I remembered once seeing this sentence at a website that says “nearly everyone and their DOG knows about AVG and is testing the latest AVG FREE version 8 right now”. I believe that is very true because I have a friend who is 50 over years old and he once “suggested” AVG to me… He is a business man and not even a computer literate person. That proves how successful AVG’s marketing is.
In my opinion, the latest AVG 8 is a bit bloated and not as light as the previous version 7.5. In fact, many software has started to add more and more feature in every major release and that makes it bloated. If you’re using AVG FREE 8, I’d suggest you to switch to another one which I’ve tested and found to be better than AVG. Also, recently more and more Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 key that gotten from Barclay’s promotion has been blacklisted. You could switch to this antivirus if you want…
RISING Antivirus 2008 is developed by a Chinese software company in Beijing. It protects your computers against all types of viruses, Trojans, Worms, Rootkits and other malicious programs. Ease of use, Active Defense technology, Patented Unknown Virus Scan&Clean technology and Patented Smartupdate technology make RISING Antivirus ‘ install-and-forget ‘ product that lets you focus on what you really want to do.
RISING Antivirus Free Edition is a solution with no cost to personal users for the life of RISING Antivirus 2008 while still provides the SAME level of detection and protection capability as Rising Antivirus 2008. RISING Support centre will also provides technical support for Free Edition users. RISING expects more users can enjoy Lion-strong security protection.
I’ve tested Rising Antivirus free edition on my desktop test system with a few trojans. Some are public versions which is detectable by most antiviruses and some private which can only be detected by certain good and powerful antivirus such as Kaspersky. When Rising AV sees the virus, it doesn’t immediately notify me that it has found a virus. Only when I try to run it, Rising File Monitor Alert appears telling me that it has found a virus and giving me the option to clean, delete or ignore the file. This is good because it doesn’t constantly scan in background which will slow down your computer. It can detect all public version of trojans that I try to copy to the computer.
Next, I tried scanning a private version of trojan with Rising Antivirus but it did not detect anything. I was a bit disappointed, thinking that this is like any other free AVs out there that doesn’t have a good proactive engine. When I run the private trojan, it did not infect my system! I suspect that Rising Antivirus somehow blocked the threat. So I disabled all Rising Antivirus auto-protect, and ran the trojan again. Now the system is infected. I re-enabled auto-protect and ran Hidden Process Detection. It detected a hidden process which spawned by the trojan. I ran a scan on the memory and boot records and it was able to detect and remove the private trojan. I AM IMPRESSED! As you can see, although Rising Antivirus did not have the virus definition to identify the private trojan as a threat, but it can somehow block it from infecting the computer. Even if it is infected, it can detect hidden process and remove it from memory.
Is Rising Antivirus a bloatware? Here are the process that I’ve identified which belongs to Rising Antivirus.
ravtask.exe – 676K
ravstub.exe – 3411K
ravmond.exe – 8192K
ravmon.exe – 2048K
ccenter.exe -1652K
All 5 processes above takes up about 15MB from memory. Since most of the computer nowadays come with at least 1GB of RAM, you wouldn’t really feel that Rising Antivirus is hogging on your computer. It is not heavy in system resource usage nor light. Moderate would be the best word to describe Rising Antivirus’ system resource usage.
Rising Antivirus can run on Windows 98 up to Windows Vista 64 bit. The system requirements to run on non-Vista computer is Pentium3 500 MHz, 64 MB of RAM and a standard VGA 24-bit true color. As for Windows Vista, Pentium3 1 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM and a Standard VGA 24-bit true color.