Developed by the multiple award winning Grisoft concern which is re known for its world class antivirus engines, AVG Free Edition is a suitable antivirus engine that runs on personal computers at home. As the name indicates, the product is free of charge to all of its users for life.
Easy to use, the single PC user can benefit a lot from this engine which is able to provide free rapid data base updates for the entire life of the product. Moreover, the engine uses very few of the system resources thus minimizing the load on the system which might have slowed it down as is the case with numerous other antivirus engines in the market. When the user install the AVG Free Edition engine on the system, any previous versions of the AVG Antivirus tool on the system are automatically uninstalled.

Some of the features of AVG Free Edition include:

. Provision to update the databases automatically and periodically.
. Provision for an email scanner to scan all incoming and outgoing mails along with an on demand scanner that helps the user to run scans based on the users preferences.
. Provision for an AVG Resident Shield for protection of files that are operated upon in a real time environment.
. Provision for an AVG Virus Vault that is used to handle infected files without letting the infection spread to other files.

Some of the imitations of using the AVG Free Edition tool include the following:

. The utility can be used only for standalone home computer and cannot be used for systems running in organizations.
. The tool cannot be applied at the server end and it cannot scan network drives.
. The free edition tool neither supports multiple scans nor employs advanced techniques to make the scan more effective.
. Installation of the engine would prompt the service to request the user to download a similar product that the program would not require may term the engine as adware.

The new version 8.5.283.1450 has some enhancements over the previous releases including:

. Improvements made in the installation process and Resident Shield Scanning of files.
. Bug Fixes in some cases like missing help tool in the Rescue wizard, cleaning read only files, and default Resident Shield notification windows to name a few.