Review by Bugs

I was pretty enthusiastic about this product at first. Their free antivirus has pretty good reviews, though I’d not tried it myself. If I had it to do over, I’d probably try the free version before installing this full suite to see if there were problems with any of my applications. I had a lot of problems with Magic Jack and this program.

It installed very easily. It did offer to install a browser toolbar - the Avira SearchFree Toolbar. This tool bar promises that it stops companies from recording your web activities, and makes sure you get safe sites when you search. These features are also in the free antivirus product. I generally do not trust browser toolbars, and due to the nature of my Internet activities, I really need my browser to load a lot of windows fast and be as fast as possible. It would just be overhead.

I put this on 3 different computers - the older XP, which is a 32 bit system that is fairly responsive normally when surfing or doing light activities, just slowed down to a crawl. Furthermore, that computer runs Magic Jack - that’s really about it’s only purpose in life, and the updates and scans constantly turned off Magic Jack leaving me without a phone. I’ve used other AV on that computer in the past and never had that problem. After a week, one look at my event logs showed that there were tons of new errors in my operating system and a couple of system crashes during scans and during Magic Jack load on startup that were not there before this install. I took AVIRA off and put Trend Titanium 2013 back on that PC. Personally, I wouldn’t even try this on a PC running Magic Jack. They just don’t seem to yin-yang.

The other 2 PCs that I tried this on were running Windows 7 and were 64 bit systems. Again installation went well. Both PCs had ample resources. However, one is mainly used for gaming, and started having too much lag time, so it was uninstalled from that PC. The other one, which is mainly used for light graphics, surfing, and web work, is still doing fine with it.

So, I do think there’s better options out there. This suite does have great features and would be very nice for an older parent that needs a lot of protection and that might have a fairly nice computer. If you’re maxing out your resources on your PC as it is, or doing really intensive work with one, I’d look for another vendor that has a lighter resource utilization profile. I’d probably also try the free version first, to see if it works ok before considering a move to this full Internet Suite.

I don’t think any anti-virus program has installed easier though, and I like the 3 license options. It states that it also runs on mobile, although I did not test it on any of those platforms.