Download Avast Anti-Virus For Windows 8

By Kirmani on October 29, 2012

avast antivirus

As always Avast is on top of the shelf of all anti-viruses with free security features, hybrid update tech, file reputation analysis and much more. With no doubt Avast is leading anti-virus software with more than 150 million registered users.

As for review, lets take a look on it’s features and what it offers. Avast offers a list of free features and strong, tough hardly stellar, performance benchmarks. While these tools are clearly non-essential, and some of the prices struck as high–$10 for a Rescue disc? $50 for an annual backup service?–we like that Avast gives its fans a chance to stay in its eco-system. The Avast EasyPass, for example, is an Avast-branded version of RoboForm's premium password manager and is well worth the $9.99 annual fee.

Avast 2012, aka Avast 7, includes several new features that directly impact your security. One of the biggest changes is a hybrid update technology that pushes out updates in real time. Because a full database update isn't required, Avast users will get their security updates much faster than before. Full database updates will also be pushed out, just not as frequently.

Another important security change introduces a file reputation system for evaluating downloads. This tech has existed for a couple of years in paid security suites like Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender, but Avast is the first free antivirus to offer it. It leverages community data from Avast's enormous active user base to help determine if a file is safe.

Avast's WebRep browser add-on for instant Web site safety evaluation has been extended to work with Safari, and it will also now check for fake certificates. Faked security certificates were an unexpected problem last year, demonstrating how fragile Web security protocol could be.

In a half-day of testing, none of these appeared to cause any negative impact on computer or browsing performance. Assuming these technologies work as advertised, your computer ought to be a fair bit safer from malware with them.

And although we're more than half a year away from Windows 8, Avast has included some attention for the forthcoming Windows 8 beta, also known as the Consumer Preview, gets some attention from Avast as the suite includes an Early-Load Anti-malware Driver (ELAM) for guarding against system-level rootkits.