Avira Antivir - Free or Paid?

[Pilgrim]

I have used Antivir Personal for a long time now and apart from occasional problems with downloading updates I have been very satisfied with it.

Just recently I was reading the thread on free license keys for the Premium version.
Normally I would not have bothered but several people commented that by the time one key expired it was usually possible to get another from a new promotion.
So I decided to give it a try.

It would seem logical to me that a paid version would be better than the free version, right?
In this case definitely wrong!

I found three problems with the Premium version that I have never experienced with the free one, mainly because the last two do not apply:

First, avguard.exe was frequently using 60+% CPU for long periods.
Second, ProActiv was constantly being disabled for unknown reasons.

I found numerous posts on the Avira Forums about both these issues, some going back many months, as yet with no solutions.
The last problem I only found through coincidence.

I had installed Antivir Premium on both my PC and my Netbook.
Another program I have had on my PC for a long time is Mailwasher Pro and I had been thinking about getting another license for the Netbook.
After I upgraded (?) Antivir I got the chance of a lifetime license for the original Mailwasher Pro for half price, so I got one.

When I installed Mailwasher Pro on the Netbook it picked up my email accounts from Outlook Express and I then copied the rest of my settings from the PC.
Everything was going alright until I clicked on Check Mail.

I have 10 accounts set up in Mailwasher, 6 are SMTP, 4 are POP3, they all use SSL.
When I clicked Check Mail it ran through the SMTP accounts and then stopped.
A minute or two latter I got an error message for the 4 POP3 accounts saying 'Error connecting to SSL'.
After looking into the problem I found that they were being blocked by Antivir MailGuard which is not in the free version.
After checking the PC I found that since I had installed Antivir Premium I had not received any POP3 emails on that either.

I could find no way of resolving this apart from disabling MailGuard and I could find no reference to the problem on the forums for either program.

I spent several days trying to sort these problems out without success, I have now gone back to the free version of Antivir on both computers.

Perhaps free is better in more ways than one.

[Pilgrim]

i think the paid version u are using is security suite

No, I was using Antivir Premium, the Security Suite has a firewall.

Another thing that I forgot to mention in the first post was WebGuard.
I have no idea how effective it is but it certainly slows down loading web pages.

[noaccount]

Dude try posting that in Avira forum you defenitly got a problem...

[hellnoire]

And people wonder why I changed to Avast Free the minus my ESET sub was up, and not to Avira... I've been running into some problems too, and I've been emailing their techs back and forth.

[Ande]

Apparently this is not uncommon. I remember, for years, Zonealarm free firewall had less problems with any other software than the paid version.
Maybe it's that the paid version is trying to do too much or is too intrusive, where the free version does what it is supposed to do and nothing more.

[kgaurav]

Avira personal version is best

[Pilgrim]

What concerned me the most was the problem that Antivir Premium caused with Mailwasher Pro, they are both well-used programs and I find myself wondering how many other people use both and are missing emails that they know nothing about?

noaccount,

I look on the Avira Forums if I am trying to find anything out but I never post on there.
From some of the posts that I have read on there I have been left with the feeling that at times there is an attitude problem with some of the replies.
When it comes to Antivir Personal I have often seen replies that seem to imply "it's free, what do you expect for nothing?".
I think part of the problem is that they have far more users than they can deal with at times, a good example of that is what happens to their servers when they have a particularly large update, let alone a new version.

[Funkysourav]

i am under the impression that Antivir Premium does have some bugs and compatibility issues
but i am using Avira Premium Security Suite with disabled firewall and and medium macrovirus detection and disable Mailguard
its causing no problem
yes the Webguard eats some bandwidth, but it is a fair trade-off considering the protection it offers

Right now Avast! Free looks quite good,
try coupling that with Comodo Free Firewall(but disable the Defense+)
and Malwarebytes Free on demand scanner

[Pilgrim]

Funkysourav,

Although I do not have a problem with lack of space I never install software which I then need to disable part of to use.
To give you an example, you mention the Comodo Firewall which is what I use on both my computers, v2.4.18.184 which was the last version that was just a firewall.

No system is impregnable but with the way I have mine set-up the only things I have ever managed to pick up are adware cookies, the last one of those was three years ago.

I have active security programs running but all automatic scanning is turned off.
I also have a selection of on-demand scanners one of which I use to scan downloaded files all of which, except on very rare occasions, are downloaded into Sandboxie.

I have no specific security for browsing or email although all browsers and email programs run inside Sandboxie by default.
Also, having Mailwasher Pro I can check emails without downloading them.

Security is something that there are many different views on.
The first AV I ever came across was Norton, a trial version of which was installed on the first computer I ever bought.
Norton/Symantec software tends to produce diametrically opposing views, either you love it or you hate it.
In my case it necessitated a complete format of my hard drive which involved the loss of the recovery partition.
At the time this happened I knew virtually nothing about computing and it was quite an ordeal, today I would act differently.