That did not sound well, and it frankly reminded me of Nero and how the company turned a lightweight and excellent CD and DVD burning software into an overweight beast.

AVG 2011 Free can be customized before installation. Doing so provides options to install it on a different drive, or add and remove features from the program before installation. If you remove features you are likely to end up with a lower size on the computer’s hard drive and less background processes. For the sake of this article though, I have decided to install all suggested modules. I did however select an installation directory on another system partition and decided to remove the AVG widget from the installation. The widget basically offers options to quickly run a scan and see if the system is protected, nothing that you cannot find out by clicking on the AVG icon itself. And AVG will notify you if it encounters problems.

Lets take a closer look at the components that are installed by AVG Antivirus Free:

• Personal E-Mail Scanner: Monitors email clients using POP3, SMTP and IMAP for phishing and spam.
• LinkScanner: Blocks dangerous websites in browsers automatically, and checks links on popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
• AVG Search-Shield: Compatible with Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live search engines, displays safety information about search engine links.
• AVG Surf-Shield: Protects users from drive by downloads and other exploits: Selected by default.
• Identity Protection: Monitors the way programs behave on the computer, blocking any activity that could lead to ID theft.

AVG downloads roughly 130 Megabytes during installation, if the offline installer was used to install the antivirus software.

The size on the hard drive however turns out to be more than that. The AVG installation folder on the hard drive will use roughly that size alone. What’s puzzling is that AVG creates another folder on the system drive, regardless of the selected installation path. This additional folder is located in Users\All Users\AVG10 on Windows 7, and uses 302 Megabytes on the hard drive. That’s a lot. Most of the space is taken by the SetupBackup folder. I assume that folder is there to prevent the user from having to download the setup files again when making changes to the antivirus software. It takes up 223 Megabytes on the system partition. The second biggest folder is the update folder with a size of almost 70 Megabytes.

It is definitely not a good practice to store files of that size on the system partition, especially not if the user has selected a different partition for installation of the software. At least a notification should be displayed to inform users of this fact.

If you take a look at the system processes you may be in for another shock. On the test system, AVG was using six background processes all the time. Jojo even mentioned eight processes on his system. Lets take a look at their names and their functions:

• avgchsva.exe: AVG Cache Server Process, the process is apparently used to cache all system files in the background. avgchsva.exe will minimize its system resource usage after the cache has been populated, but keep on running nevertheless.
• avgcsrva.exe: The core scanning module of AVG.
• AVGIDSMonitor.exe: AVG Identity Security Monitor process. Monitors processes and behaviors in realtime.
• avgrsa.exe: AVG Resident Shield Service, scans files as they are copied, opened and saved, and if a threat is found forbids the activation. It also provides vital protection for the system areas of the computer according to AVG.
• avgtray.exe, AVG Tray is monitoring application over all AVG components and is responsible for showing pop ups by AVG (email scanning, computer scanning, Resident Shield / LinkScanner detections, etc.).
• avgui.exe, likely linked to the graphical user interface of the AVG program.

Another annoying thing is that it is not possible to reduce the number of processes by disabling features of the program. I would expect that disabling Identity Protection would remove the AVGIDSMonitor.exe process. This is apparently not the case.

The processes do not seem to be using lots of resources, at least not when they are idle. The biggest idle processes are avgui.exe followed by AVGIDSMonitor.exe and avgtray.exe.

The biggest problems that I see are the massive size of the setup and update files on the system partition, and the number of running background processes.

What’s your experience with AVG’s latest antivirus software? Let us know in the comments.

Some criticized the size of the download, which at 135 Megabytes felt bloated, especially when compared to the last version of AVG Anti-Virus and other comparable solutions such as Avast Free Antivirus.

The second area of criticism was the fact that AVG seemed to only offer a web based installer for their antivirus application, which seemed to make it impossible to install and use it on an already infected computer system.

After some digging on the AVG homepage we came up with the direct download links for AVG Anti-Virus 2011 Free. Linked below are both the downloads for the full installers of the 32-bit and 64-bit edition of the antivirus software.

• AVG for Windows Web Installer
• AVG for Windows 32-bit (135 Megabytes)
• AVG for Windows 64-bit (153 Megabytes)

Update

AVG changes the file names of the offline installation files regularly. You can visit the following page that offers direct download links for all three versions listed above:

http://free.avg.com/de-en/download.prd-afh

Those download links may change over time, as they contain version information in the filename. If that is the case, visit this download page directly for the new links. The links to the offline installers, documentation and updates are displayed on it.

Additional information about the changes in AVG 2011 can be found in the official press release on the AVG website.

GRISOFT is announcing a new version of the AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. This new 7.5 version with improved performance and full compatibility with the latest Windows Vista version is available. Users that are using AVG Free 7.1 will be provided with a specific dialog, within the next few weeks, with the opportunity to choose the right option fulfilling their needs. AVG Free 7.1 version will be discontinued on 15th of Jan 2007. 

In case that you are still looking for an antivirus solution other than AVG Free I recommend Antivir which is completely free for personal use. I have been using Antivir for some time now and have not encountered serious issues as of now. I would say that a successful solution depends more on the user behind the keys than on the antivirus program that he is using.