For those with hardly any money to spend on computer resources, the Antivirus software is available totally free. However, one may wonder how effective it is.

These free antivirus softwares have been tested to determine whether they are one hundred percent effective. The user needs to feel safe and confident with this free antivirus software’s as no one would want a situation where by their computer is damaged by viruses.

These free Antivirus software comes in three types namely; the AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, AVAST 4 Home Edition, and AVG Free Edition. This software’s are all rated as effective and can detect these crazy viruses easily.

During the tests performed on the free Antivirus software’s, each of the individual software’s was put on a weighing scale and rated. The factors that were considered during the rating were such as; the impact of the system, presence of zoo viruses and spyware/adware. The further checked if false positives were present and also the speed at which the reports sure issued once a virus is spotted.

However, during the testing the speed of scanning was not included in rating the softwares. The scan speeds are very different depending on what system one is using.

The minimum qualification for any antivirus software is its ability to detect wild viruses. Therefore, no special rating was given for this function during the testing.

In comparison to the other two free antivirus software, the AVAST 4 Home Edition had the best rate of zoo virus detection. This was actually 92%. The AVG Free Editing had 91% and the PersonaEdition Classic had 85%. On the other hand, AVAST had the highest level of high positives which were nine while the Antivirus had two. The AVG received the lowest in the two mentioned categories with a total of eleven false positives.

The response rate was also analyzed during the testing. The response rate actually checked out which Antivirus could give an update fastest. The Antivir was among the best five, AVAST made two appearances will AVG made only one.

When it came to the compressed and archive type of files the AntiVir can scan 30 files while AVAST and AVG can scan 28 and 17 respectively.

For the adware and spyware all the three antivirus softwares performed poorly. AVAST was slightly better than the rest as it removed 33% of the active components. The PersonalEdition handled 5% and it was zero for AVG.

The three sofwares used a very small disk space. The smallest was actually AVG which had 30Mb . If you are running an older version computer then the footprint is very important.

Surprisingly AVAST doesn’t not have any support charge and one would have to pay for any support awarded. Does this make it a cheaper option?