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The main window can be considered as a status-window because clicking on the icons just shows the explanations of the modules in the bottom pane. Normally I would expect them to take me to the configuration screen for that module. Just for your information, the settings can be reached by going through the Tools
→ Advanced Settings. The nice thing that I noticed in the settings is to define POP3/SMTP servers to be scanned and the option to remove e-mail attachments for all executables, documents or defined file extensions. Many of the settings such as e-mail, resident shield are not present in the competing products therefore I can heartily give a big plus to AVG for the configuration options.
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For the test run, I took a trip to the dark side of the Internet, to the places where Indiana Jones-types go. The websites I know are infected and I wanted to see how AVG would behave. Then I have searched these websites on popular search engines and tried to see how AVG did with the search results. I was shocked to see that many of the popular infected sites were marked as “safe.” I wasn't expecting any better, but my “download crack serial” search results were all marked as “safe” also. You can check the screenshot on the right. I do not expect all illegal forum sites to be unsafe, but if Internet Explorer can warn me against the malware threat where AVG tells me the opposite, and if the Internet Explorer is right, there has to be something going wrong.
Then I went on with the anti-virus and anti-spyware features. In my tests the on-demand scanning was slow, detection rate was average and script malware detection was a little bit more than 40%. There were many false positives as well. I wanted to push the program a little bit further, but the picture so far was demoralizing for an antivirus program, claiming to have 80 million users. Note that my testing was by no means comprehensive or extensive, but it nonetheless enough to convince me that AVG's detection/protection is not as good as it could be. The results of much more detailed testing can be found at AV Comparatives.
