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Add to SafariWhen comparing avast! vs Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+, the Slant community recommends avast! for most people. In the question“What are the best free anti-viruses for Windows?” avast! is ranked 7th while Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ is ranked 8th.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Decent anti-virus protection
Pro Easy to use
Ad Aware Free Antivirus+ has a clean, well designed user interface that's easy to use for anyone. It features a game mode, so that you're not disturbed by any kind of notification or not have your computer's performance weighed down by background scans while gaming.
Pro Real-time protection
This is one of the few good free antivirus solutions that offer real-time protection, stopping malicious processes on your computer at any given time. Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ also scans downloads for malware.
Pro Solid spyware and virus detection rates
Ad-Aware is a well known veteran in battle against adware and spyware and today still counts as a solid piece of security software on that matter. For virus protection, it gets similar scores as the most trusted paid antivirus solutions without having many false positives.
Cons
Con Tries too hard to sell you the paid version
Con Too noisy
Avast! has sounds turned on by default. It also has a lot of blinky features of questionable use.
Con Makes your system slower than usual
Even though scans are not being run in background, it will slow your system.
Con Opt-out installation of Google Chrome
These advertising tactics are simply unacceptable.
![[deleted]](https://avatars.slant.co/identicons/50/eb641207-4f56-47e7-903e-e7b5d8f48db4)
Con Selling potentially identifying user data
Con Detection rate isn't too solid
Avast! is not the sort of antivirus product to give you peace of mind. In practice, it does miss some malware every now and then. You'll need backup virus protection, which raises the question why you should get Avast in the first place.
Con Expires after a year leaving computer exposed to new viruses
Expires and stops updating after a year after which the user's computer may become infected by new viruses not covered by existing patterns.
Con May interfere with hyper-V
Since avast has its own virtualization engine, it will cause issues with hyper-V.
Con Unable to detect some adware such as FADE adware
Con Blocks or causes issues on apps or games
Con "Smart Screen" feature
When running an unknown application, avast will run it wrapped in a sandbox environment first for scanning, then kill the process and re-run it again. A lot of applications do not like this.
