avast! 4 Home Edition 4.8.1229

avast! 4 Home Edition is a full-featured antivirus package designed exclusively for home users and non-commercial use. Both of these conditions should be met! Our company offers the Home Edition free of charge, since, in our opinion, it is possible to avoid global virus spreading by efficient prevention; however, many users are not able to or do not want to pay for antivirus software. This page will show you the most important features of this program.
Institutions (even non-commercial ones) are not allowed to use avast! Home Edition. However, ALWIL Software provides the full line of avast! antivirus products at special discount prices for non-profit, charity, educational and government institutions. Please see our price lists for details.

Special features:
Web Shield
Virus Chest
Network Shield
Antivirus kernel
Automatic updates
Internationalization
Standard resident protection
Integrated avast! Virus Cleaner
System Integration

P2P and IM Shields
Avast features a module for the protection of IM (Instant Messaging, "chat") programs, and a module for the protection of P2P (peer-to-peer) programs. The list of supported IM and P2P programs is extensive with more than 30 programs currently supported.
While chat itself would not impose any serious security risks in terms of viruses, todays IM applications are far from being just chatting tools: most of them support more or less sophisticated file sharing methods - which may quite easily lead to virus infections, if not properly monitored.
The P2P protection module doesnt need much explanation - on todays P2P networks (such as Kazaa) there are thousands of infected files, and an effective protection is a must.