You see? - Of course every AV program has some signature failures at times, but after all avast was disappointing. Of course it might be just my personal experience.

AVAST seems to get rated on pretty highly on detection rates in comparative reviews and scores well on false positives too. I too used NOD32 for a long time and I have to say I have had fewer false positives with AVAST.

The new GUI isn't perfect but it is a huge improvement on the old one and certainly better than NOD32's which is a bit of a sprawling mess.

I think Symantec dude was hired to move Avast up in Symantec, Mcafee etc. class. Now they compare products, line them up, encourage you to go Pro/Suite - same old trick AVG has taken to new levels. "For on-line shopping and banking, upgrade to avast! Internet Security." must be there

They also run a pretty active blog now. Even the beta was approved to be in Google pack. More aggressive marketing perhaps. "Get Chrome with Avast" also counts http://blog.avast.com/2009/12/03/avast-and-google-chrome/

That's interesting - but Network Shield has no configurable options ???

No Network shield just sits there. Only reacts to their black list. I think what I have read and misunderstood is that firewall has option of adding own domains, may be whole lists/hosts files. Don't know but would be cool. Pretty sure an Avast guy said url blocking was going to be moved to firewall though. Could be months ago and they changed policy at some point. Well it works but how big and updated black list is for free version is I don't know. There could be a difference. With security software that will typically be called "enhanced blocking of malware domains" If you see comparison page free version does not protect against "high risk websites" or "Lets you safely browse suspicious websites or applications" that is url blocking they refer to so I don't know. Not many details about features.

5 is clearly better than 4 in most ways I can think of. More features too. How can he ruin that? I think 5 is just more of the same user friendly Avast marketing but with the difference that they now have better products to sell. Suites will always appeal to people and Sandbox is a very strong Pro feature. They are alone to have that for both 32 and 64bit? With all new shiny stuff they had no reason to cripple free version. Is still AV enough for most but own marketing like comparison page will of course be sure to make paid versions look better. They could not do that before because they had no products to "back it up"

I have heard Purplus http://store.purplus.net/downloads.html has the cheapest prices. They have boxed versions too. All you need is a valid key, rest is nothing or junk.

Be careful about 3 pc vs. 1 pc license. Must have latest version regardless of brand or you end up paying for upgrade. You know of course renewal is cheaper than a new license, even at Kaspersky estore.

I think there is some important information value in the fact these 6000 samples are 15-20 years old, and the Avast guys reply was that unless they were ancient sample he would be very interested in seeing them Which means he know there is a difference. Considering how they struggle with current malware we can hope sacrifice has been made for a purpose.