Avira Antivirus Premium 2013

How much would you pay for antivirus antivirus protection? And how much would you pay to make that protection better? Avira Antivirus Premium 2013 has some features that the company's free antivirus doesn't, and it scored a bit better in my hands-on tests. However, I'm not entirely sure that those slightly better scores merit the product's $29.99 price.

The premium edition adds cloud protection, behavior-based malware detection, and access to remote-control tech support. Its Mail Protection feature checks incoming messages and attachments for malware, but if you also want spam filtering you'll need to upgrade to Avira's full security suite. The free and premium antivirus products display controls for all the components of the full suite, with controls for unavailable components grayed out.

Tough Installation
As with the free edition, getting Avira installed on my malware-riddled test systems was a challenge. I did learn from my previous experience that Avira's bootable Rescue Environment can solve quite a few installation difficulties.

For those problems not solved by the Rescue Environment, I turned to tech support. One specific benefit of the premium edition is that you get full access to support, up to and including hands-on remote-control diagnosis and repair of problems with the program. As it turned out, tech support managed to solve my remaining problems via email and live chat.

Avira's cleanup of infected files did cause some collateral damage on a few systems. On advice from tech support, I replaced specific system files with copies from a clean virtual machine running the exact same Windows version. I also could have restored files using a Windows installation CD but alas, I don't have one for Windows XP SP3.

Average Malware Cleanup
Avira Premium definitely cleaned up my infested test systems better than Avira Antivirus Free 2013. It detected 76 percent of the threats, which is precisely average for recent products, while the free edition detected just 71 percent. Avira Premium's overall score of 6.2 points definitely beats the 5.7 points earned by the free product.

Other products have done quite a bit better. Norton AntiVirus (2013) and Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2013) both detected 89 percent of the samples. Norton and Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus 2013 share the top score in this test, 6.6 points.

Like quite a few current products, Avira Premium detected 100 percent of the samples that try to hide their activities using rootkit technology; the free edition caught just 80 percent. Avira Premium's rootkit removal score of 8.0 points is good, but nowhere near rootkit-killer Kaspersky's 9.4 points. For details on my malware removal tests, see How We Test Malware Removal.

Effective Malware Blocking
Avira Premium also beat its free cousin in my malware blocking test, but just barely. The free edition detected 92 percent of the samples and scored 9.2 points, while the premium edition detected 95 percent and scored 9.3 points.

Webroot topped this test with 100 percent detection and an impressive 9.9 point score. Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2013 , SecureIT, Daily Safety Check Home Edition , and BullGuard Antivirus 2013 all managed 97 percent.

Avira did score a perfect 10 for blocking rootkit samples, but so did fully half of the products tested with this same sample set. To learn just how I perform the malware blocking test, please see How We Test Malware Blocking.

I also attempted to download my current set of samples again, to check on Avira's promised Web protection. Of course quite a few of the URLs are no longer functional. Of those remaining, Avira Premium blocked 64 percent, the same as the free edition. The only difference was that it blocked some threats earlier in the download process.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ez5Ki7AJPew/0,2817,2411315,00.asp

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