I first became acquainted with AVG Anti-Virus when my old computer succumbed to a Trojan virus and never completely recovered. It was quite upsetting, as I had always kept my antivirus program on my computer up to date and paid the usual yearly fee, but apparently, the Trojan virus slipped through completely undetected, and once it was there, it was impossible to remove. Then a friend in IT told me about AVG, the best free antivirus software I have ever used.

To some extent, you do have to cut the antivirus program developers some slack. Hackers are always creating new viruses, and it is often difficult to keep the security programs up to date, even with daily updates. In the computer world, you can consider effective when you have a success rate above 80. This means out of 100 virus attacks, your software let through 20. Considering a virus can cripple your computer this does not give you much comfort. However, AVG has a success rating of 94.2, according to testing done in 2010. This ranks it above many programs that are not free, such as Norton and Trend Micro. In fact, these results are comparable to McAfee, Symantec, and ESET, none of which are free and all of which scored only a couple of percentage points higher than AVG. For this reason, AVG is definitely the best free antivirus software currently available.

AVG comes in two forms. The free version is AVG Anti-Virus, and only includes the antivirus program. For 50 dollars, users can upgrade to AVG Internet Security, which comes will additional bells and whistles such as additional download protection and email protection. If you are downloading massive amounts of music and video files from the Internet, then you should probably upgrade to the full protection, as many files available on the Internet do contain virus. However, for most consumers, AVG Anti-Virus should be more than enough to keep their computer operating safely online.

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