It’s impossible to stress too highly the importance of using an antivirus program. Connecting to the Internet without one is about as safe as going on a sex tour of Bangkok without the necessary protection. Most people already know this, of course, but it’s worth repeating for the benefit of new users. It’s no good convincing yourself that you are OK as only trusted friends have your e-mail address – if one of them has an infected computer you may well receive an e-mail from that computer containing a virus without that person even knowing. If you have a fast Internet connection which is on all the time you are exposed to viruses too, as you are if you visit certain Internet sites. And no, it’s not just porn sites – plenty of sites offering free music files or screensavers for example are riddled with potentially harmful viruses. Using a firewall protects against some intrusions but is no help if you open that mail attachment or click on certain links. Not all viruses are seriously harmful – but there are enough that are to cause absolute misery for the user of an unprotected computer. It’s a mystery to me why some people put so much effort into writing software that will damage the computers of people they’ve never met. Advertising and fraudulent spam may be an infernal nuisance but at least the motive is clear – to make money – but those sad, inadequate losers who deliberately produce harmful programs for the sake of it are way beyond my understanding. Perhaps they got bullied at school or can’t get laid – who knows?

For a long time Norton AntiVirus, produced by Symantec, was synonymous with Internet protection. When I got my first PC I installed Norton AntiVirus 2002 and it served me very well. It let nothing bad through and picked up on every infected mail I received. A couple of years later I bought a laptop and with this came the 2003 version. This too offered decent security while remaining relatively unobtrusive. The only beef I had with Symantec was their scandalous practice where renewal of the yearly subscription was concerned. A few weeks before it was due, Norton AntiVirus would pester the user with reminders, and if you resubscribed early to shut the damn thing up your new year’s paid subscription would start from the date you paid rather than the date the old one expired. In my book that’s a con. The software itself however gave me few, if any, problems and I was quite satisfied. I had started to see many critical comments written about Symantec, often stated in rather intemperate terms, and this surprised me. I suspected that it was much the same as the constant Microsoft-bashing that goes on, which I believe is often motivated more by politics than real dissatisfaction with Windows. Certainly Windows has some infuriating habits but an operating system such as XP, which works fine 99% of the time and is as stable as one could reasonably expect, can’t be as bad as all that.

When my subscription for Norton ran out last year it was not much more expensive to get the 2006 version than to renew the subscription for the existing one, so that was what I did. I soon realised that some of the flak aimed at Norton was fully justified. The new program still provides a safe environment to work in, offers decent worm protection and attempts to address spyware issues (this last not very well, I should add). The result should be the ideal anti virus program but alas, that is not the case. What is wrong?

To start with, Norton 2006 is so infuriatingly meddlesome that it’s almost on a par with the current Labour government on this score. When you boot up, you can’t run any programs until Downing Street...sorry, Norton says it’s OK to do so. Now that may be fair enough some of the time but even if you restart your PC after getting the latest updates and performing a full scan you have to wait for two or more minutes while Norton sits there and broods. If, Heaven forfend, Norton decides something is wrong, it demands immediate attention and your screen is covered by a pop-up the size of America that keeps annoying you until you give it attention. Most of the time the “urgent issue” is to check for updates, which it does on its own anyway without prompting from the user! More nannying takes the form of endless messages telling us how hard Norton has been working, e.g. “Norton has blocked an intrusion attempt” or some such. Now call me fussy but unless it requires some action from me, I don’t want to know – yet Norton insists on telling me whenever it’s been a good little boy. If it wants a sweetie why doesn’t it just say so?

Well, now I’ve got that rant out of my system, I’ll admit that I could happily live with the above annoyances in exchange for trouble-free virus protection. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Not only is Norton 2006 bloated and so resource hungry that it seriously affects the speed of your computer, there are problems when it tries to install new updates. In fairness this does not happen every time, but on several occasions Norton has insisted that I check for updates, which I have done only to be told there are no new updates available. Yet Norton is not satisfied and throws a wobbler, insisting that I urgently check for updates again, with the same result when I do so. The end result is that if I can get to the status screen without Norton freezing altogether the entry beside “Virus definitions last updated” is the dreaded word “Error”. Sometimes a reboot or system restore solves the problem but in the last couple of months I have had to reinstall the program three times. It was the last time this happened that I realised that unless I wanted to get sent to the funny farm for wandering the streets of Prague shouting “Nooooortooon! NOOOORRRTOOONNNN!” I should perhaps look at other software as an alternative.

I looked at a lot of discussion forums about the subject and Avast! was one of the most highly rated. I was drawn to this program also because it is made in the Czech Republic, and although this is unlikely to be selling point for most people, my love of all things Czech influenced my decision. I should perhaps add that so far I have found no grammatical, idiomatic or spelling errors in the text of the English version, which was clearly written by an English speaker of native level.

You get a trial version which lasts for 60 days – a very generous amount of time to evaluate the product especially as the home edition (which I use) is free. You can upgrade to a paid-for professional edition if you are planning to use the program in a commercial network. For most users the home edition is more than adequate. I will admit that for me, the program being free was not a selling point, the opposite in fact. Like many people I had a few doubts – after all, if Symantec collects millions of expensive subscriptions per year and still produces a flawed product like Norton 2006, surely a free program is by nature low budget and can’t be much good? I believe firmly that you normally get what you pay for, and while I have no problem using free media players, web download programs and the like, the area of antivirus protection is far too important to take chances. In fact, my fears were completely groundless and I suspect that companies like Symantec play on such concerns in order to make money from their products.

Installation went smoothly and quickly. Before I could use Avast! I had to get rid of Norton, and here is a word of warning. Norton embeds itself into your computer very deeply, thus lending some credence to the claim that Norton IS a virus. Using Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel only gets rid of some of it – to remove Norton completely you need to do a search for all folders with “Symantec” or “Norton” in their names and also run the REGEDIT program to delete all registry entries with these words in their names. Symantec does produce a tool for removing their program – the fact they have to do this doesn’t say much for their confidence in their own product and frankly, I wouldn’t trust it.

When Avast! starts up you are presented with an interface (a display with the controls for the program) that looks a bit like the front of a car radio or video recorder. There are other designs or “skins” available if you should wish to change the appearance of the interface. One of the two small disadvantages of Avast! compared with Norton is that the interface is not that easy to get to know quickly, relying as it does on symbols rather than words for the various buttons. The Help pages are very informative however so this isn’t much of a problem.