avast! Premier 8

By Neil J. Rubenking

Most security vendors offer a standalone antivirus tool as well as a security suite that rounds out protection with such features as a firewall, a spam filter, and parental control. These days quite a few vendors offer a higher-level suite with additional features such as backup, performance tune-up, or password management. avast! Premier 8 ($89.99 direct for three licenses) does add several features not found in avast!'s basic suite, but the additions really don't merit a $20 bump in price.

The program's main window looks exactly like that of avast! Internet Security 8, except for the window title. It has the same Windows 8-inspired touch-friendly buttons, and the same big panel that reflects overall security status. You'll have to dig a little to find those premier-only features.

Same Antivirus Protection
Antivirus protection in this suite is exactly the same as in the basic suite, and in avast!'s free antivirus. Please read my review of avast! Free Antivirus 8 for details beyond the brief summary that follows.

Getting avast! installed on a couple of my twelve malware-infested test systems required hours of remote-control diagnosis and repair by tech support. On my new scale defining ease of installation, that rates two stars. A product that installed and ran with no hassle would earn five stars; one that utterly failed to install on one or more test systems would get just one.

Tested with a brand-new malware collection, avast! detected 75 percent of the samples and scored 5.5 points. Both detection rate and score are very close to the average of products tested using my previous collection of malware. With 6.6 points each, Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete 2013 and Norton 360 (2013) scored much better. For details on how I perform this test, see How We Test Malware Removal.

Avast! did a good job of blocking access to malware-hosting websites, but its overall score in my malware blocking test was 8.5 points, a little below the average of products tested with the previous malware set. Webroot owns the top score in that test, 9.9 of 10 possible points. To learn more about my malware blocking test, please read How We Test Malware Blocking.

All of the independent labs I follow include avast! in their tests. It gets high scores in some tests, but not all of them. Top products like Bitdefender Total Security 2013 earn high scores across the board. For more about the independent labs and their testing methods,

see How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests

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