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! ALWIL Software 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.

avast! 4 Home Edition features:
The latest version of avast! antivirus kernel features outstanding detection abilities, together with high performance. You can expect 100% detection of In-the-Wild viruses (viruses already spreading between users) and excellent detection of Trojan horses.

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.

Resident protection (the real-time protection of the operating system), is one of the most important parts of an antivirus program today. avast! features a powerful resident module that is able to detect a virus before it has any chance to infect your computer.

Avast features a module for the protection of IM (Instant Messaging, “chat”) programs, and a module for the protection of P2P (peer-to-peer) programs. The list of supported IM and P2P programs is extensive with more than 30 programs currently supported.

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)).

Developer: ALWIL Software
License: Freeware
OS: Windows All
Size: 20.8 MB
Download Avast Home Edition 4.8.1201 link