Review by Matt Morgan

AVG is best known for their free antivirus though they have offered for years a full security suite. I had never bothered to try AVG Internet Security (AVG IS), mainly because it is an expensive package in comparison to most of the other offerings on the market. That said, it is a solid product and worth consideration in spite of the cost.

I should start by stating, for the record, that I had a dreadful install experience. AVG IS partially installed itself and then errored out. After a reboot, AVG IS was alive but outdated, and what was broken was the ability to update. Worse, the uninstall was also broken. After getting the uninstall ironed out, I tried to install again and this time everything was much smoother.

AVG IS is organized and clean with a very clear and easy-to-understand overview dashboard. At a glance you can tell what is active and what is not active. Double-clicking on any of the icons in this view gives access to adjustment controls by which the component in question can be manipulated and set as desired. I like this particular view. One thing that is not clear, though, is that to get to the real nuts and bolts of the various components’ configurations, one must use the pull-down menus, not the icons.

AVG’s firewall appears to do a good job of hiding the system on the net, locking down service ports and cutting off ping responses. I was unable to break it. However, where it gets interesting is in the control afforded the user - individual applications can be locked down, policies set for different networks, and so much more. Other firewalls do this, but AVG’s organization in the interface is better than average.

AVG’s track record as an antivirus vendor is well known. However, with versions prior to 9.0 their antivirus was slow, intrusive and hard to interrupt. AVG seems to have gotten the idea of how to improve this - it took about 90 minutes to scan over 1,000,000 items if you include the registry and even running at full speed I hardly noticed except for the fact that I had the task manager open and saw an occasional spike in CPU activity. I launched several applications, typed a lot, and even searched for a file on the hard drive and saw no real impact on the system. Cycles consumed seemed to be consistently under 10%.

AVG throws a lot of other things into the mix that you’d expect in a decent suite - antispam, antispyware, rootkit detection, and several other components. What surprised me was to find a process viewer that has the ability to kill processes, accessible from the dashboard under system tools. I have never worked with a security suite with that built-in as part of the package. Included is a connectivity viewer and even a startup process viewer, with the ability to manipulate the entries within. That’s a very nice plus.

I’ve been unable to work with the antispam up to this point, as I get no spam. Even so, there are many, many settings that can be adjusted to the antispam, such as adding a blacklist server such as spamcop to assist with checking, Bayesian training and a lot more. Based on the feature set I suspect this antispam is very effective.

AVG IS includes a McAfee-style system of evaluating returns from search engines, marking unsafe links in the results window. It is not as thorough as McAfee’s Site Adviser, but it is effective in giving you heads-up when there is a possible danger ahead.

There are two things that AVG does not have that I wish were present. First, there is no parental control module. It looks like AVG made no effort at all to include a parental controls module, and while that’s ok it is something that most other security suites include. I was unable to even find a manual block list - if it’s there, I cannot find it. Second, I found no ability to see the presence of other computers on the network. It is not something that I have found in a lot of suites but it’s a very nice-to-have.

AVG has put together a very nice internet security suite. The main components, the antivirus and the firewall, are both very effective and all of the other components seem to be working nicely. There is room for some improvement/expansion, as is true with most security suites, but what is here is very polished and clean. AVG is a little pricey when compared to most other suites, but in spite of that cost it is very much worth consideration when looking at computer security suites. I am comfortable giving AVG IS a ⁵⁄₅ stars rating - it isn’t absolutely perfect, but what is there is excellent.