AVG Anti-virus Free 8.0 was released on April 24,2008 and since then it was installed into our system. Compared to AVG Internet Security 8.0 which we reviewed about two months ago, AVG Free 8.0 only provides the anti-virus, anti-spyware and LinkScanner component minus six other major protection components like anti-rootkit and a firewall. You may think that “Hey, cool! LinkScanner in its free version!” but AVG decided to leave out the pro-active safe surfing module. This means that LinkScanner would not protect you from drive-by-download malwares like in its paid version.

The pro-active Safe Surf module is very efficient in protecting from automatic downloading of trojans through hijacked websites which we will recommend you to upgrade to AVG Internet Security 8.0 if you ever needed a tougher protection.

Program User Interface

The picture above is the exact screen shot of AVG Free 8.0 user interface. However what you do not see above is a big red attention notification telling you to upgrade to AVG Internet Security every time you double-click on AVG Free - kind of annoying for most users.

AVG LinkScanner

More onto AVG’s latest acquired technology, LinkScanner is integrated as a security toolbar into the internet browser. We find that it is currently available to only Windows Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox and not any other major browsers like Opera and Safari.

How does LinkScanner in AVG Free 8.0 works? Security notification is embedded next to search results just like in the picture below. You can tell when a website is safe to visit when the icon is green, questionable when it is yellow, risky when it is orange, dangerous when it is red. LinkScanner works fully in Google and MSN but partially in Yahoo. It is weird that AVG chose to integrate Yahoo Search bar in its security toolbar when the only icon that is available to Yahoo is the red dangerous icon. That means that you don’t have the safe green icon to tell you that it is safe to visit.

Performance

Memory:

Took up approx. 59.2Mb of RAM space. That’s quite a huge chunk!

Scanning speed:

59 minutes 44 seconds to finish scanning 4GB worth of installation and executable files.

CPU usage:

An average of 35-45% CPU usage and a high of 89%.

Conclusion

Ultimately, AVG Free 8.0 is way much advance than its previous version 7.5 but the only drawback is its memory consumption. The reason why many users chose to install AVG in the past years are probably it is free and light in memory usage. Are the users willing to spend some buck to buy the extra RAM capacity just to have AVG 8.0 installed?