Avast didn't sandbox any of our regular, trusted programs, but when we tried a couple of malware samples it jumped in to protect us from both: a very good start. Any changes the program might then make will apply only to the sandbox, not your PC, so keeping you safe from many malware types.ĭoes it work? Sandboxing is a complex technology, and it takes a great deal of work to figure out how thorough a particular implementation might be, but our first impressions are positive. One of the headline new features in Avast 6 is the AutoSandbox, which automatically runs anything Avast finds suspicious inside a virtual environment.
Future scans required little in the way of system resources - maybe 5-percent CPU utilization or less, around 28MB RAM (private working set) - and we were able to freely use other programs as the scans were running, without seeing any performance degradation. And for some reason our system remained largely unresponsive for all of that time, so for instance we would try to launch a program and it wouldn't appear for some 90 seconds: very odd.įortunately this was only a temporary issue, and once we left the scan to run to completion, and rebooted, the problem went away entirely. It wasn't actually that quick on our test PC, though, taking some 25 minutes to complete.
But if, say, you already have the Web of Trust add-on installed, and don't want Avast's similar offering, then a click on the Custom Install option will allow you to disable it, and any other features you may not require.Īvast doesn't force you to reboot after the installation, and instead launches a "Quick Scan" to hunt for malware. All the new features mean there's a greater than usual chance that Avast will conflict with some other tool you've installed, of course.
Installation was reasonably straightforward, with no complex options to worry about.