AVG Anti-Virus Free

Introduction
AVG Anti-Virus Free is an application which will protect your PC from malicious viruses and emails. AVG Free is the “lite” version of AVG Pro and although it doesn’t have all the features of the Pro version, it offers regular and automatic updates, real-time protection of files and e-mails from viruses, scheduled and manual testing and many more. Finally, among many other advantages, AVG Free runs on both Windows and Linux operating systems.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Installation:
You can download the free version of AVG Anti-Virus from the official website:  http://free.grisoft.com .

Let me take you through the installation procedure:

• Double click on the setup and click “Next”
• Click “Accept” for the next 2 steps
• If you want to, you can modify the “User Name” & “Company Name” fields; when you are done, click “Next”
• Click “Finish”
• That’s it, click “OK”

When the installation is over, AVG might present you with a wizard. You can take some time to play around a little bit or you can simply close the wizard; we will be covering the things you need in detail below.

That’s it, now the AVG Anti-Virus is already installed and running.

How to use AVG Anti-Virus Free:
AVG will automatically start when windows starts so there’s no need for you to actually launch it.

However, you can access the AVG control panel by going to:  

Click on: Start->Programs->AVG Free Edition->AVG Free Control Center

This is what the AVG Control Center looks like:

• Look carefully at the components of area number #1 in the image above; this is what you will mostly be playing with.
• In the image above, the “Anti-Virus” component is selected and not surprisingly, it is marked with a red, attention sign. This happens because the virus definitions are probably not up to date; and thus, we need to make sure that AVG has the latest updates.
• In order to update AVG, you need to select the “Anti-Virus” component of the list (it is already selected in the image above) and then press the update button.
• Then, choose that the update should come from the internet by pressing the “internet” button.
• Unless there is some type of problem, AVG will first show you the updates that are available. Select the one that you desire and then click the “Update” button.

As soon as you have clicked on the “Update” button, AVG will start downloading the updates:

When the downloading is finished, AVG will tell you that everything has been updated and all you have to do is to click on the “OK” button; that simple.

• If you want to schedule a system scan or alter the settings for the resident shield, the email-scanner etc, you can always use the other components of the list in a very similar way to the one that I showed you above.

How to scan for viruses with AVG Anti-Virus:
If you want to scan your PC, a CD, a diskette or simply some files/folders for viruses, you need to launch the AVG Test Centre.

You can launch the AVG Test Centre by going to:

Click on: Start->Programs->AVG Free Edition->AVG Free Edition Test Centre

This is what the Test Centre looks like:

• If you want to scan the whole computer, you should press the large “Scan Computer” button. In case that you want to scan only a few files you should press the “Scan Selected Areas button”. For the purpose of this tutorial, let’s scan the whole computer; click “Scan Computer”
• AVG will automatically scan the whole computer, all you need to do is to let it do its job; you can either go out for a walk or you can continue using your PC normally.
• When AVG has finished scanning your PC, if it has found any viruses it will quarantine and remove them and then, it will notify you. Apart from that, AVG will present you with an analytical report on how many files were scanned, how many viruses were found etc.

When you scan for individual drives/files/folders, the process is almost identical so you shouldn’t have any problems with that.

Conclusion
AVG Anti-Virus is not your common 2-clicks-and-you’re-done utility. In fact, it is a very powerful application/anti-virus which gives you many options; of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s not easy to use!