Antivirus programs are a must nowadays. When it comes to protecting your machine from online criminals, they are our only friends and saviors. When choosing an antivirus package, it is advisable to find out more about different antivirus programs on the market, how often the products are updated, what features they have and what components they possess. It goes without saying as well, that free antivirus programs are not worse than most commercial products. Avast is a good alternative for Norton, Dr.Web and Kaspersky.

What is so important about Avast? Besides known functions like virus, spyware and spam detection and blocking, it incorporates a lot of useful features, including rootkit protection and P2P monitoring. The program works quietly in the background and does not bug the user with constantly appearing messages or alerts, provided your machine is clean from malware.

After downloading (free of charge for home users) and installing Avast, you might want to scan your computer at startup so that rootkits might be found and eliminated. The only bad thing about it is that database supplied with the insatallation package does not come updated. So, it is strongly advisable to update antivirus base first.

Comparing Avast to Kaspersky, the former is much faster and does not consume too much of the CPU load. It is more convenient, though antivirus base updates happen two or three times a week. If you prefer speed to performance, Avast is your best bet.