None of the three free antivirus products tested for the "The New Virus Fighters" ranked highly, but Grisoft's AVG Antivirus Free Edition holds the distinct honor of having placed last among all ten paid and free contenders due to a clunky interface, the omission of significant features, and below-average performance.

The main interface provides just three options: Scan Computer, Scan Selected Areas, and Check For Updates. Options on the console's left panel, such as the Scheduler, lead to notifications that the features you seek exist only in the paid version of the product, AVG Professional.

In our performance tests, AVG Free Edition ranked second to last. (Alwil Software's free Avast Home Edition ranked last.) While AVG Free Edition caught nearly 100 percent of bots and zombies in our collection of zoo malware, it caught a disappointing 65 percent of Trojan horses. It ranked second-to-last in our heuristics tests--detecting just 11 percent of worms and 8 percent of backdoor programs using one-month-old virus data.

Upshot: Limited features and poor performance make AVG Free Edition an inferior choice even among the free antivirus products.

-- Tony Bradley