For the second part of our five part series on the best free antivirus applications, we’ll take a look at Avast! Home. Another renowned name in the security scene, Avast! Home is superficially known for its brushed metal, media player-like interface. In our tests, Avast! used up 36 MB of system RAM, slightly more than AVG, but nothing to get alarmed at. Using the default settings, the standard scan was fairly quick and clocked in at 56 minutes. But with only 89,510 elements scanned, it checked considerably fewer files than AVG. While AVG did not pick up anything, Avast! Home detected 6 different pieces of potential malware on our machine. We liked how Avast! Home gave us an ample choice of actions: repair, delete, deny access, move, chest, and scan. When you dig in the Avast! settings, you’ll find features like exclusion list, which can be quite useful to refine your scan, or alerts on malware you can send to friends via email or IM. With new malware appearing every second, we don’t really believe this function is of much use. The only real annoying thing with Avast! Home is that, although it’s free, you’ll need to register once a year or so, just as a formality, to keep using it.

Avast! Home test results:

• Uses up 36 MB of memory
• Full scan time: 0:56:38
• Scanned objects: 89,510
• Frequent updates and large virus database
• You need to register once a year
• Handy exclusion list to target your scan
• Send warning alerts to others via email or IM

Free antivirus apps part 1: AVG