Avast! Professional Edition 4.8 is a collection of award winning, high-end technologies that work in perfect synergy, having one common goal: to protect your system and valuable data against computer viruses, spyware and rootkits. It represents a best-in-class antivirus solution for any Windows-based workstation.

avast! Professional Edition can be downloaded and used free of charge for a 60-day trial period. At the end of the trial period, a license key must be purchased to continue using the product, which will be then valid for a further 1, 2, or 3 years.

Avast! Professional is the paid version of the exceptionally popular free antivirus program, Avast!, and offers protection from viruses, spyware, rootkits and a multitude of other internet security threats. Unlike some other solutions which support only the more recent operating systems, Avast supports Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Read on to find out how well it works.

Installation and Setup
After downloading the 35 MB setup file, installation and setup is a quick and easy process. Users are able to choose from Typical, Minimal and Custom installation options and, for most people, the Typical option is probably the best bet.

Avast! works perfectly well with its default settings and so users need not delve into the program’s configuration options unless they wish to do so.

Free Trial Version Limitations
Unlike most solutions which have a 30 day trial period, Avast! offers a generous 60 day trial throughout which the program is fully functional.

User Interface
Avast! has an uncluttered and intuitive interface. The Program Settings screen provides access to the program’s basic configuration options while the On-Access Protection Control screen provides access to the options which enable granular control over pretty much every aspect of Avast!’s operations. All-in-all, the program is well laid out and makes navigation easy.

Ease of Use
ALWIL, the developers of Avast!, have done a good job of making Avast! easy to use without sacrificing any of the advanced features that more experienced users want. The program will work perfectly well with its default settings, or you can customize and fine-tune pretty much every aspect of its operations.

Features
There are no real surprises in Avast!’s feature set. It does what you would expect from a modern antivirus solution, offering both signature and heuristic-based protection from viruses, spyware, rootkits and other internet security threats and customizable scanning options. Additionally, Avast! can also integrate with popular web browsers, email, instant messenger and P2P applications to provide an additional tier of protection.

But where Avast! really shines is in its customizability. Just about every aspect of the program’s operations can be changed: individual modules can be paused or completely stopped; the sensitivity of heuristic scanning can be altered, or it can be turned off completely; it can be set to scan or not to scan system libraries. In short, you can bend Avast! exactly to your will.

Avast! doesn’t offer some of the extras that you may find in other antivirus solutions – such as instant messenger encryption or performance optimizing tools – but it does provide what most people want and need most from an antivirus solution: namely, solid protection from viruses and other forms of malware.

Performance
Avast! is exceptionally light on resources and has almost zero impact on performance. Given that it requires only 32 MB of RAM on a system running Win9x or ME, its economical use of resources is not at all surprising and makes it an ideal choice for anybody using an older PC.

Security
Avast! may not be the best known antivirus solution on the market, but it’s certainly one of the most effective. In an independent test by AV Comparatives (www.av-comparatives.org) in August 2009, Avast! scored an Adanced+ rating by detecting 98% of malware samples. Solutions from vendors including McAfee, Kaspersky and Microsoft detected less malware samples and earned only an Advanced rating. The product has also received numerous VB100 awards from Virus Bulletin (given to products which detect 100% of in the wild viruses) and been certified by both ICSA and West Coast Labs.

Avast! is also very good at avoiding misdetection. A program that mistakenly tags legitimate files as viruses can create real headaches for users, and especially inexperienced users. Avast!, however, create very few such false-positives.

Help and Support
Should you find yourself in need of technical help, Avast! offers no-cost technical support by web form or email. Help can also be found in the online FAQ and Support Forum. All-in-all, Avast! is an extremely well supported product.

Avast! Professional Versus Avast! Free
Both Avast! Free and Avast! Professional use the same antivirus engine and offer similar features, but there are a number of differences. Avast! Pro offers a script blocker, task scheduler, command-line scanner and an enhanced user interface. But possibly the most notable difference is the Push update feature –which is only found in Avast! Pro – which enables ALWIL to push high priority updates to users as soon as they become available, meaning that people do not have to wait until their next scheduled update to protected against the latest threats.

Conclusion
Avast! may not be one of the best known antivirus solutions on the market, but it is one of the best and will provide both your computer and the data that it holds with industry-leading protection. Highly recommended.

For a computer running Windows® 95/98/Me:
486 Processor, 32MB RAM and 100MB of free hard disk space.

For a computer running Windows® NT® 4.0:
486 Processor, 24MB RAM and 100MB of free hard disk space and Service Pack 3 (or higher) installed

For a computer running Windows® 2000/XP® Workstation (Not Server):
Pentium class Processor, 64MB RAM (128MB recommended) and 100MB of free hard disk space

For a computer running Windows® XP® 64-bit Edition:
An AMD Athlon64, Opteron or Intel EM64T-enabled Pentium 4 / Xeon processor, 128MB RAM (256MB recommended) and 100MB of free hard disk space

For a computer running Windows® Vista, Windows® 7:
Pentium 4 processor, 512MB RAM and 100MB of free hard disk space

For a computer running Windows® Vista 64-bit Edition:
An AMD Athlon64, Opteron or Intel EM64T-enabled Pentium 4 / Xeon processor, 128MB RAM (256MB recommended) and 100MB of free hard disk space

The program itself requires about 60MB of hard disk space; the remainder of the recommended space is reserved for the virus recovery database file and its index (VRDB, also known as the "integrity database" from the previous version).

A functional MS Internet Explorer 4 or higher is required for the program to work.

This product cannot be installed on a server operating system (Windows NT/2000/2003/2008 Server families).

Note: The operating systems Windows 95/98/Me/NT4 will be supported until the end of 2009.