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¤ avast! Home Edition
avast! 4 Home Edition is a full-featured antivirus package
designed exclusively for home users and non-commercial use.
Both of these conditions should be met! alwil offers the
Home Edition free of charge, as it is possible to avoid
global virus spreading by efficient prevention; however,
many user are not able to or do not want to pay for antivirus
software. This page will show you the most important features
of this program.
Institutions (even non-commercial ones) are not allowed
to use avast! Home Edition. However, ALWIL Software provides
the full line of avast! antivirus products at special discount
prices for non-profit, charity, educational and government
institutions.
Antivirus kernel
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The latest version of avast! antivirus
kernel features outstanding detection abilities, together
with high performance. You can expect 100% detection
of In-the-Wild viruses (viruses already spreading
between users) and excellent detection of Trojan horses.
The kernel is certified by ICSA; and frequently takes
part in the tests of Virus Bulletin magazine, often
yielding the VB100 award.
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The avast! engine also features outstanding
unpacking support. It can scan inside the following archives:
ARJ, ZIP, MIME (+ all associated formats), MAPI (Outlook
pst files), DBX (Outlook Express archives), RAR, TAR, GZIP,
CAB, BZIP2, ZOO, ACE, ARC, LHA/LHX, TNEF (winmail.dat),
CPIO, CHM, RPM, ISO, 7ZIP and SIS. It also supports a number
of executable packers (such as PKLite, Diet, UPX, ASPack,
PeShield, FSG, MEW etc.).
Last, but not least, it can also scan for viruses hidden
in Alternate data streams on NTFS volumes.
Simple User Interface
The Simple User Interface is used to start
on-demand scanning, work with the results and change various
options. Basic resident protection settings can be modified
here.
The Simple User Interface is the main application of avast!
4 Home Edition. You can start additional avast! modules
from here, such as the Virus Chest, Updater or Log Viewer.
The appearance of the Simple User Interface is very flexible.
It supports so-called skins, allowing users to change the
appearance of the application interface. The main package
contains three skins, with additional skins available from
our web pages.
Standard resident protection
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Resident protection (the real-time protection
of the operating system), is one of the most important
parts of an antivirus program today. avast! features
a powerful resident module that is able to detect
a virus before it has any chance to infect your computer.
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avast! Home Edition contains resident protection
of the computer file system and a resident module for e-mails
and news.
File system protection ensures that no virus will be started
on the computer. It offers a wide range of settings, such
as the possible to specify that files will be scanned during
copying, or that the scanning will include files with given
set of extensions only.
E-mail/News protection consists of two independent modules;
first, there is a generic scanner working on the SMTP/POP3/IMAP4/NNTP
protocol level. It is capable of protecting any existing
e-mail client that uses these protocols. Second, there is
a special plugin for MS Outlook only; the mail scanning
is completely transparent, requiring no special settings.
A new feature of version 4 is heuristic analysis of e-mail
scanners. This feature can protect against new, unknown
viruses and worms that are not possible to detect by the
usual means. The heuristic module performs a thorough investigation
of every e-mail message and watches for suspicious signs,
that might announce virus presence. When the number of those
signs exceeds a user-defined level, the message is considered
dangerous and the user is warned.
P2P and IM Shields
Avast features a module for the protection
of IM (Instant Messaging, "chat") programs, and
a module for the protection of P2P (peer-to-peer) programs.
The list of supported IM and P2P programs is extensive with
more than 30 programs currently supported.
While chat itself would not impose any serious security
risks in terms of viruses, today's IM applications are far
from being just chatting tools: most of them support more
or less sophisticated file sharing methods - which may quite
easily lead to virus infections, if not properly monitored.
The P2P protection module doesn't need much explanation
- on today's P2P networks (such as Kazaa) there are thousands
of infected files, and an effective protection is a must.
Network Shield
A new resident protection module was added
to avast! 4.5: the Network Shield. This module provides
protection against known Internet worms/attacks. It analyses
all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents.
It can be viewed as a lightweight firewall (or more precisely,
an IDS (Intrusion Detection System)).
The Network Shield is only available on NT-based systems
(Windows NT/2000/XP/2003).
Web Shield
Web Shield is a unique feature of avast! that
enables it to monitor and filter all HTTP traffic coming
from the Web sites on the Internet. Since an increasing
number of viruses (and other malware, such as adware, spyware
and dialers) are being distributed via the World Wide Web,
the need for an effective countermeasures has also increased.
The Web Shield acts as a transparent HTTP proxy and is compatible
with all major web browsers, including Microsoft Internet
Explorer, FireFox, Mozilla and Opera.
Unlike most competitive solutions, Web Shield's impact on
browsing speed is almost negligible. This is because of
a unique feature called "Intelligent Stream Scan"
that lets the Web Shield module scan objects on-the-fly,
without the need of caching them locally. Stream scanning
is performed in operating memory only (without the necessity
to flush the contents to disk), providing maximum possible
throughput rates.
Automatic updates
Automatic updates are another need in virus
protection. Both the virus database and the program itself
can be updated automatically. The updates are incremental,
with only new or missing data downloaded: thus reducing
the transfer heavily. The typical size of a virus database
update are tens of KB; program updates are typically in
the hundreds of KB range.
If your Internet connection is persistent, the updates are
performed completely automatically at fixed time intervals.
If you connect to the Internet only occasionally, avast!
watches your connection and tries to perform the update
when you are online.
Having an up-to-date virus database and antivirus program
is the most certain way to protect your computer.
Virus Chest
The Virus Chest can be thought of as a folder
on your disk drive, having special properties that make
it a safe, isolated place suitable for storing certain files.
You can work with the files in the Chest, though with some
security restrictions.
The main properties of the Virus Chest are complete isolation
from the rest of the operating system. No outside process,
such as a virus, may access the files inside, and the fact
that the files inside the Chest may not be run (executable),
there is no danger in storing viruses there.
System Integration avast! antivirus features outstanding
integration into your system. A scan can be started directly
from Windows Explorer, by clicking a folder or a file with
your right mouse button and selecting the corresponding
choice from the menu.
A special screen-saver is also provided, that, when running,
performs virus scanning. avast! antivirus works together
with your favorite screen-saver, so you don't have to change
your personal settings to use it.
A new option with this release is the boot-time scan (Windows
NT/2000/XP/2003 only). This important feature allows a user
to instigate scanning before a virus is activated, in the
case that a virus is suspected to be active on your computer
already.
Integrated avast! Virus Cleaner
Since version 4.1, avast! includes the Virus
Cleaner, a tool designed for a complete removal of most
common infections from already-infected computers. So now
is avast! capable even to reliably heal (not only detect)
the most common malware.
The number of viruses/worms supported by the Virus Cleaner
is constantly growing. For the most up-to-date information
we suggest to visit Cleaner's own page (for emergency purposes
we also offer the Virus Cleaner as a standalone product,
capable of running without installed avast).
Support for 64-bit Windows
avast! Home/Professional now fully supports
the 64-bit Windows platform. ALWIL Software is anticipating
massive take-up of this platform, as Windows XP 64-Bit Edition
will support up to 32 GB of RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory,
enabling applications to run faster when working with large
data sets. Applications can preload substantially more data
into virtual memory, allowing rapid access by the 64-bit
extensions of the processor. This reduces the time for loading
data into virtual memory or seeking, reading, and writing
to data storage devices, making applications run faster
and more efficiently.
Regular (32-bit) antivirus applications are unable to operate
correctly on the 64-bit Windows platform because they rely
on 32-bit kernel-mode drivers. The new avast! uses native
64-bit drivers, delivering the same level of protection
as in the 32-bit Windows environments. The installation
package is the same for 32-bit and 64-bit versions - the
setup program automatically detects the operating system
it is running on, and installs all necessary files.
Internationalization
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Commitment to internationalization is
one of the key benefits of avast!. During the last
2 years, avast! has been translated to a number of
languages and the latest version added additional
language modules. Currently the list of supported
languages is: English, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish,
French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Korean,
Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian,
Slovak, Spanish, Turkish
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