On the 29th March alwit software released Avast antivirus v4.8.
This interested me a lot because the new release updates include:
- Anti-spyware protection
- Anti-rootkit protection
You can see the whole list here, avast.com, the good thing is that this also is avalible for the free release that supports Windos Vista x64, and that is whats makes this update very neat. No other well knows antivirus companys has this support yet for theire free release, eaven if this has been a greatly requested feature for a long time. Not including these two features – as I see it, has always been the way to make the customers buy the complete versions of the software.
Anyhow, there is a lot of company’s developing free anti-spyware tools, but the “do not include all features” trend is all over that industry too.
As for me I have always wanted a free anti-spyware software with real-time scanning, but haven’t found any good software with Vista x64 support for free yet, until now.
But what about the other free anti-virus softwares?
Yeah, well.. The free version of avg for example supports Vista x64, it also supports scanning email through thunderbird or other email clients, when avast only support email scanning through Outlook (this is not really true because you can config avast to search email with other email-clients like thunderbird but it’s a bit more advanced setup). AVG only delivers antivirus scans in their free-edition, and they got a free anti-spyware software for download. But then you suddenly got 2 programs to update and scan with and thats just not the way a good anti-virus software should be nowdays.
my Conclusion
Though there is a lot of antivirus developers to choose from and a lot of them is really good, this last update v4.8 for Avast takes avast into another league in free anti-virus software. Well, for me this is the only choice right now on a Vista machine in order to get the complete protection. However you should always use a firewall, say comodo’s and other spyware software and rootkits software additional to your anti-virus software.
Avast is now up and running perfectly, I hope yours does too :D
If not, download your copy of avast, avast.com.
This is a really nice and usable sidebar tool for all the .Net C# and VB coders out there. You simply paste your C# or VB code in a convert field and whoops, get your code translated. Works from C# to Vb and vice versa.
System control is absolutly what it sounds like. It’s a customizable panel with system controls :D. Fast links for shutting down, restart, lock, switch users, task manager, sleep, run, log off, and of course cmd. It can also display RAM usage or CPU usage or time and date. It’s just simply the perfect gadget.
I have seen a lot of clocks in different forms, vista clock, binary clocks, digital in all forms.. But this takes it all, the coolest clock i have ever seen. You just have to stop and watch the game everytime you want to know the time :D
This is the best CPU and RAM usage meter I have ever seen. I guess you know what it does. This one is from THL, read more about it in the note at the end of this post.
This is a nice network meter displaying upload/download and total upload/download. Very good if you are like me, obsessed of knowing everything that’s going on. This one is also from THL, read more about it in the note at the end of this post.