I know many people are using AVG as an anti-virus solution. Well, you probably know that AVG upgraded to 8.0, but the free version was stuck at 7.5.

Good news! You can now get the 8.0 version of AVG Free. It’s really worth it, considering that the free version now comes bundled with an anti-spyware solution, which is better than 7.5 which didn’t offer anti-spyware.

Go get it here. I personally think AVG is one of the best anti-virus solutions around, specially among the free ones. So 8.0 is worth checking out.

(Wow! That thing is growing in size! 8.0 is a 46MB file now! It was 23MB previously! I just hope it’s not becoming a bloatware!)

Here are some screenshots:

The interface is much cleaner, pleasing to the eyes and functional. Everything can be known about the state of the antivirus at a glance.

The number of settings has been increased too. AVG8 is much more customizable than 7.5. In fact, much much more!

The computer scanning screen is nice and clean. Note the slider at the bottom, where it says automatic scan. That can be changed to slow scan (less resources needed) and fast scan (more resources needed). This is a nice improvement, and I didn’t find that in any other AV I used.

(If you want to bypass the image-overlay, just right-click on the image and click View Image or Open in Background Tab (if you have TabMix) in Firefox)

Overall, I’m impressed with AVG8. It’s lots better than 7.5 and deserves its 46MB file size. Now, I haven’t tested its virus detection and cleaning skills yet. So more on this part later. Give it a try if you need a small, fast (no fuss) and free AV.

EDIT: I found a problem with AVG 8. For some obscure reason, the Link Scanner crashes my Firefox or greatly slows it down. Disabling Link Scanner in AVG itself results in an ugly icon in my notification area, with a big exclamation mark.

If you want to disable AVG’s Link Scanner, go to Tools – Add-ons in Firefox, and disable AVG Safe Search 8.0 there. This doesn’t result in an ugly icon, and returns Firefox to stability.