When you are looking for an antivirus program it is always a balancing act between getting good protection, a cheap (or free) deal and something which isn't going to make your PC freeze when you use it because of the resources it uses.

AVG is one of the best antivirus programs around, and if you are just looking for a program to protect your home PC then there is not much point buying the full version when this free program gives you everything you could expect.

You can do everything you would expect to be able to do and the interface is pretty easy to use. If you have used an old version of the firm's software you will see that it is recognisably the same programs with a few tweaks.

The download is reasonably fast and you have the option of adding the AVG toolbar onto your browser. It is actually a bit more useful and a lot less annoying than other free browsers so you might quite like to keep it on rather than doing the usual de-select that most of us choose when faced with free toolbars.

The scans and updates are easy to set up and run, although if your computer isn't of the most modern variety you might find it wheezing just a little on the automatic scan. To fix this you can just slide the bar which sets the speed/use of system resources on the scan to a lower setting.

One of the newer features which improve scanning speed is the smart scanning ability AVG 2011 offers. With this the program just scans files which it knows are safe once, unless there are changes to them. This certainly makes the scan a bit quicker than on previous versions, and it may be worth updating from an older AVG just for this feature alone.

The AVG LinkScanner feature also brings some important new benefits and if you use Facebook or MySpace you will find that this bring you an extra degree of security while you browse.

If you prefer to pay for added coverage you can get a firewall, anti spam protection and instant support on the paid version of AVG 2011. However, as mentioned before, if you simply want to be protected while you browse the web you can't go far wrong with this pretty comprehensive free program.