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! Our company offers the Home Edition free of charge, since, in our opinion, it is possible to avoid global virus spreading by efficient prevention; however, many users 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. Please see our price lists for details.
Main Features:
Antivirus kernel
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.
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)).
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.
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. You may find more information on avast! Antivirus and Windows x64 Edition page.
The free registration of avast! 4 Home Edition is performed by a robot which sends a message containing the license key to the email address you entered in the registration form.
The mail is sent from: register@avast.com
and the mailbox specified for reply is: support@avast.comListed below are several reason why you may not receive your license key:
- Filling in an incorrect E-mail address - the robot will send the message to this wrong mailbox and you won't receive it!
- Your mailbox is full - the registration message can't be stored in your mailbox and you won't receive it!
- You or your Internet provider use a so called AntiSpam program and it blocks the registration mail as a spam. Please ensure that emails from the above mentioned addresses are authorized to enter your mailbox.
After you verify that everything is OK, you are ready to register.
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