AOL’s Active Virus Shield in a nutshell
I did promise you a review on AOL’s Active Virus Shield. And here it is!
I want to point out that this review is entirely my opinion and influenced in no other way other than to test this product on my system. You also need to click on all images to enlarge.
To get the installer file, I first needed to register on their site. By entering my e-mail address I could download the file. You would then receive an e-mail with the confirmation and a key to enter into the product when installed. Once that key is typed in, then program is activated. You can then update it etc etc.
The installation process is a bit of a pain! I have ZoneAlarm’s Security Suite installed and when starting to install this program it asked me to remove the firewall because it was not compatible.
- It offers protection for a File & Mail Anti-Virus feature
- As you would expect. You can scan Critical Areas, My Computer and Startup Objects
- A Service feature. To which you can Update and look what files and the sizes of the Report files, the objects in the Quarantine and the Back-Up are
- Change the Protection settings for the File & Mail Anti-Virus features
- Change the Scan settings
- And change the Service settings
The HJT entries it will create are as follows:-
O4 – HKLM\..\Run: [kav] “C:\Program Files\AOL\Active Virus Shield\avp.exe”
O23 – Service: Active Virus Shield (AVP) – Unknown owner – C:\Program Files\AOL\Active Virus Shield\avp.exe” -r (file missing)
My conclusion:-
Well I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t pause when my CPU was at 100%. I also was a tad disappointed with the log files it produces. All of them I tried was at a big size, for example over 30 MB. Now I may have pressed some features I should’nt. I can’t see anything at this moment in time.
But other than that I was pleased. It is easy to use and friendly at the same time. It didn’t detect anything on my system.
But it sure would be interesting to see this program being used on a infected test computer. For all of this I would give it a 7 put of 10. Mainly because I don’t know how it would perform on a heavly infected system.
My thanks goes out to AOL for letting me test their product.
After some research i have still found no reason why Zone alarm should interfere with Kaspersky Products Perhaps its because they also do a Firewall
That is the only reason I can think of at this time too. It is a shame. At least for users with ZonaLab products anyway.
Can’t even install this I get an ‘Installation ended prematurely because of an error’ message. Restarting the computer doesn’t make a difference.
Using Windows 2000 + SP4 with all the latest updates.
Anyone know what could be the problem?.
Hi, this is what our forum is for. We have a special area to ask about anti-malware/virus programs.
i am trying to install aol virus protection,i uninstalled norton virus from my pc wirh remove programs but each time i try to install aol , it keeps saying i still have norton virus protection.. yet it is no-longer listed in my programs.my other aol protection works ok.any sugestions would be appreciated thank you
It could well be that is it recognising left overs from Norton.
Click this into google as the link is too lng to post here: Remove Norton Tool.
It is the first hit there. Download and run that tool. Then try installing again.
I’m glad to see an independant review of this item. I have used Kaspersky for many years now and always have found it to be a very good product. I don’t plan on installing the AOL version on my own computer but will most likely put it on family member’s machines where they seem not to be as concious about security as I am (even though I have told them many times that computer security should be of utmost concern to them :(! )
.
We have been running this for around 10 months now on 8 different desktop workstations and a couple of laptops. Can report not one virus problem or spyware infection. It is Very light on system resorces, not sure why the reviewer wanted to be running a system scan the same time as working on the computer, scans should be left to overnight downtime. And if the log file size troubles you they are easy to dissable.
We have chosen to use this software because of the way it performs and not because its free, we have spent thousands in the past on anti virus software.
I have also replaced the latest version on Kaspersky Internet Security on my main laptop with this because outlook 2007 no longer needs additional antispam.
Highly recomended and definatly a 10/10
I have installed AOL active virus shield. I still have zone alarm installed which is causing conflicts. Do I need an additional firewall to AOL AVS or is the inbuilt firewall good enough protection on it’s own? I left zone alarm installed due to a recent virus, however it is causing lots of issues. Please advise. Thanks
I’ve used this AV program for about 5 months now. It works great and doesn’t tie up the computer . . . at least after the start-up scan is over each time I boot. It did interfere with the ad-sponsored PDF995 software I was using, so I switched over to PDFCreator (freeware) and all is well again.
Downloaded this, originally received the same error as Anonymous, until I realized it’s an .msi file, which usually is on a CD. Dropped the .msi onto a thumb drive, no problem installing it from there!
It didn’t tell me to uninstall ZA, and ZA was running during the installation, and they’re running fine together now. Maybe it’s particular versions of ZA, or they’ve fixed this?
As for the security toolbar, since it seems to be an IE-only thing it didn’t concern me much, but still was able to uninstall it through add/remove programs. Still running through my (four!) anti-spyware apps to see if it dropped anything nasty (based on some later comments the author posted).
I am using AVS on my laptop since last month. I am quite happy with this AV program. Now I would appreciate to have it on my PC at home as well. The thing is that I don’t have an internet connection at home to activate or update AVS on my PC.
Do you know how this could be done ???
Thanks in advance
All questions relating to this can be asked in our forum. It gives a chance for everyone to view it as this article is not even on our front page anymore.
This is the forum to ask in;-
http://forum.securitycadets.com/index.php?showforum=8
I have been running AVS for some months now and one fine morning it decided to crash! It showed a command window apparently taking some sort of a data dump and refused to start up after that. I tried uninstalling it and then re-installing it fresh. but the same thing happened again… Anybody knows what I’m supposed to do?? Thanks!
Ask in our forum. I’ll disable comments for this article. Any future questions should be put forward in our forum in the link above.
Andy