Download Summary Report 2012 - AV

evidently assume that the user has already found the page concerned, and is wondering what to do
with it. There is no indication as to how to navigate to the relevant area of the settings in the first
place. For example, the entry on scheduling begins “On this page you can schedule a scan to run
once, automatically on a given day…”. We feel that entries such as this rather miss the point of a
help service, and question their value to the majority of users. Unfortunately, our search of the
online knowledge base failed to find relevant answers either.
The user manual, which can be downloaded conveniently from the program’s Support page, is
entitled “Quick Start Guide”. It is 25 pages long, and as the name suggests, is a brief introduction
to the most important aspects of the program, including the default installation process, updating
and scanning. It is very well illustrated with screenshots. In terms of content, we would say that it
is fine as far as it goes, but that a more detailed manual would be helpful. Whilst we found the
simple format of the Quick Start Guide quite acceptable in principle, we were rather left with the
impression that the document had been produced in a hurry, with no form of indexing or
bookmarking, and slightly blurred-looking text and screenshots even at 100% magnification on a
1600 x 1200 resolution 20” professional -standard monitor. We also note that the manual has been
produced in a format that makes text searching impossible; even using the search term avast! failed
to produce any results in Adobe Reader’s search function.
As a whole, we have to say that we found the help functions and documentation for avast! Free
Antivirus 7 to be rather disappointing.
Verdict
We consider avast! Free Antivirus 7 to be an excellent program in many ways. There is an exemplary
range of options in the setup and uninstaller wizards, and the program interface is clean and
modern, making almost all important functions and information easy to find. It has sensible default
configuration, clear and appropriate reactions on malware discovery, and useable scanning options
in Safe Mode. However, we feel that communication with Windows Action Center, as well as the
help functions, could be improved.
35