Avast Professional Edition skillfully scans your PC and several programs for viruses, although configuring it is not for the faint of heart.
Immediately after installation, the program asks if you want to schedule an antivirus scan of your local hard drives at system start. You'll notice two icons in your system tray after installing Avast: one to configure the functions and another to activate the virus recovery database.
Well-designed, Avast scans executables, inbound and outbound e-mails, and P2P programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, and Morpheus. Instant messages received from several messenger programs are inspected for harmful viruses as well. The program was able to block URLs and common file operations such as renaming and deleting. We appreciated the sensitivity adjusters to get protection to desired levels including normal, high, or customized.
We must say this application did slow down our system while surfing and using other programs. Many of its configurations require intermediate know-how or better. Fortunately, it has a generous 60-day trial. Don't let the steep learning curve turn you off; Avast safeguards your system at optimum levels.
