The one and only: Avira AntiVir Personal takes the COM! test

There is one thing that all tests have in common in the end: a winner! In this case the winner is Avira AntiVir Personal, also known as Free Antivirus. The product managed a decisive victory over nine fellow-competitors in the major comparative study organized by computer magazine COM! (Issue 10/2009).

There are plenty of free antivirus solutions on the market, but which of them offers reliable basic protection? This was the question pursued by the COM! testers when they ran an extensive suite of tests on the ten most common PC monitoring systems. This was the first time that Microsoft’s new “Security Essentials 1.0” was included in the tests.

All programs were tested in a standard configuration under Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 3. When it came to virus detection, the virus guards were required to identify a total of 3,200 “in-the-wild” viruses and 480,000 lesser known harmful malware. Points were also deducted for products that had less strong adware and spyware. Test speed, as well as ease of operation and service are the icing on the cake for an excellent overall evaluation.

Avira AntiVir led the rankings with a respectable lead over the second-placed product and an overall grade of “good”. “This was easily the best detection rate offered by all the test candidates (...). The winner of the test achieved excellent detection rates and scanned extremely quickly summarized the Com! testers. It’s hardly surprising then that our Free Antivirus Version has been on the market for 10 years now and is in use with well over 100 million users worldwide.