AVG is one of those programs that slowly grew into people’s hard drives. It was the first free anti-virus software I heard of, but it wasn’t adopted very much because people consider their competitor’s products much better.

As time went by, Grisoft greatly improved their product that went from a very basic anti-virus that provided protection only the simplest, or most obvious, of viruses to a much more solid security program that does most of the things Norton or any other’s AV programs do without consuming 20% (or more) of your computer resources.

Version 8 now includes built-in protection against Trojan horses. Although I still prefer to use a dedicated program like Spybot for that type of malware, this should help protect my friend’s/family’s computers against these annoying programs that seriously gimp their PC’s performance and compromise their security.

If you are looking for a lightweight Anti-Virus I recommend you try out AVG 8 free, and then purchase one of their software packages with added security if you like it.

You can download it from here.