Avira - My Experience.

[PcTek9]

I bought Avira to use on 3 pc's at home. It was like $70.00 - $90.00 for 3 licenses for 1 year. I like Avira, it's lighter on pc resources than Avast or Kaspersky and not as expensive as Nod32.
But this year I did not renew it. Why? Because something would keep turning off the entire Avira protection suite. I don't know what was going on with that, but it would. I'd think everything was fine, and it wouldn't be.
I also don't like toolbars, if I have to have a toolbar such as ASK to be part of my antivirus, then I don't want that antivirus. You can turn off ask, but if you do it apparently leaves a way for something to completely turn off the entire antivirus suite and leave your system completely unprotected. Also turning off the Ask search bar folds the Avira umbrella indicating your system is not fully protected, and every time I would turn on my computer I would get a nag to download and install the ASK searchbar I had just removed. Really annoying.
The latest version of Avira has this giant notification window that pops up like a mini pop up ad, I really hate that.
Avira has a great detection rate, but needs to integrate their web protection into their product rather than relying on a search engines tool bar in my opinion.
Another thing that bugged me, was I would scan the system with Avira and Avira would report nothing found, but then i would scan with SpyBot and it would find critters, and suddenly as if Avira had an epiphany, a pop up would occur like "Oh my God, I suddenly just found the same thing that SpyBot found!".
Sometimes SpyBot would find a few more than Avira would. I was using the freeware version of SpyBot, so you as you can imagine my personal experience with Avira has been a bit concerning.
I may simply have to pop out the $90 bucks for a copy of Nod32 and run that on 1 pc, and install linux on all the rest.

 

[Tekguy]

If you select the custom installation when installing Avira you can uncheck the option to set Ask.com as your home page & the default search engine. There's also an option at the bottom to not install the Toolbar.

I just installed Avira on a laptop that has a fresh install of Windows & no toolbars were installed. I bet removing the toolbar after Avira was installed may have something to do with the real-time protection stopping. Try reinstalling Avira without the toolbar & see what happens.

I also don't get any big pop-up ads, although the little ones in the lower right corner are kind of bothersome. Are you getting pop-up ads with the paid version? Avira has been at the top of AV-Comparatives the last 2 times. It may have missed something that Spybot found, but I'm sure it will find considerably more malware overall than Spybot.

 

[PcTek9]

Yes, as I stated I was using the paid version, and I did reinstall avira without ask, and it would pester me to reinstall it. Not popup ads but instead popup avira system notifications that on my widescreen lcd take up an unecessary amount of screen realestate. Still the real issue is the entire system randomly deactivating. Very uncool.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

You think it's lighter than avast? Just worked on an OLD XP laptop for some friends of ours, put avira on it, seemed slower. Took avira off, and on with avast, seems a little better, like the interface on avast too. Avast with mbam pro may drag my system on startup, but seems like decent protection.

 

[iladelf]

Hope I'm not getting too OT, but I've been testing out Panda Cloud Antivirus, and although it's still bogs down older machines a bit, it's pretty easy to set up, and doesn't seem too intrusive (mostly set it and forget it).

That said, it's got some goofy nag screen that pops up in the lower right-hand corner of the desktop, wanting you to buy the "Pro" version. Problem with that is, it looks a lot like PUPware or malware when it does that.

 

[PcTek9]

Well, Personally - I always loved Avira, and found it to be VERY lightweight for the protection it offers, which is in the top 5. I used to be a big Avast fan before Avira, but then Avast for a while switched to a super heavy, super lethargic slower than crap interface, that bogged down the pc I had at the time to a crawl. Also the changed interface I hated. I understand Avast has fixed a lot of these issues, but when I last downloaded and checked Avast it was slightly slower than Avira, so I found the opposite of what you did.
I'm also p*ssed at Avast for discontinuing the U3 version of Avast, and offering us nothing to replace it with of the same quality, which I felt they should have done and could have done.
But Avast is a strong leader in the antivirus community, usually always also in the top 5.
Personally I think the Top 5 are usually always... Avira, Avast, Nod32 Eset, Kaspersky, and some random other one that everyone bickers about. <GRIN>