The IT Nerd

There’s lots of choice out there for Mac users who need a free antivirus product. Avast has a strong player with it’s free antivirus for Mac application. It’s simple to install once you download it. Once you install it, you’re not going to find a ton of security features like schedulers, junk cleaners, or backup utilities. Were talking about  basic protection on a local, email, and browser level. Now that’s not a bad thing as Avast has clearly decided to make this antivirus app as simple and easy to use. This sort of thinking extends to the user interface. Status updates are kept to a minimum. Periodically, Avast Free Antivirus throws a notification at you via an unobtrusive pop-up in the top right hand corner. Any options to do anything interesting exist inside the app which you get to via the menu bar icon that gets installed along with the app. In terms of scanning, it’s not the fastest antivirus app that I’ve tested. It took about 30 minutes to scan my Mac and it did find a couple of PC viruses that I had planted to test it. Importantly, it did not affect the speed of my Mac which is important as you don’t want to have your antivirus app slow you down. One handy feature is that if you have an Avast account, you can expand it to monitor any device or computer that’s been registered with that account and it will display on your Mac.

What’s my bottom line? Avast Free Antivirus is clearly designed and developed as a no-frills, quick security solution for Mac users. If you’re not a power user, you should try it out. I think you’ll like what it brings to the table.

UPDATE: I no longer recommend this product as it uses a “Man In The Middle” scheme to protect you which is extremely stupid and risky. More details here.

This entry was posted on August 20, 2014 at 6:13 am and is filed under Products with tags Avast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.