One of the most popular Antivirus companies Kaspersky announced a new free version of Antivirus solutions for users worldwide as Kaspersky Free. By announcing a free version of their Antivirus product, Kaspersky is offering a good choice (in addition to existing free antivirus solution from other brands), to Windows PC users who cannot afford a paid Antivirus solution. At Avinashtech, we have never had good opinion about the free Antivirus solutions compared to the paid solutions in spite of being free and we do hope Kaspersky manages to change that our opinion. Here is our review of Kaspersky Free which we are using at the moment on our laptop. Keep in mind that our favorite Antivirus solution till date is Kaspersky Internet Security and we use that only on our Windows PCs.

Kaspersky Free Download and Installation

First of all, Kaspersky free can be installed via he global installer available here. It’s a web installer and need an internet connection to download the required files and install. Depending on your internet speed, the install finishes in few minutes. The license activation is automatic if you are connected to internet during the install. On activation, Kaspersky Free gets a license of one year which perhaps needs to be renewed each year.

 

The interface of Kaspersky Free is almost same as what we saw in the paid Kaspersky antivirus except that some of the additional features are grayed out. In terms of features, Kaspersky Free includes the essentials and basic security components for any antivirus solution i.e.

  • File antivirus,
  • e-mail antivirus, and
  • Web antivirus
  • IM Antivirus
  • URL advisor

It includes the features needed for a good antivirus solution i.e.

  • Automatic updates
  • Self-defense
  • Quarantine

Kaspersky Free uses the same security engine as the paid Kaspersky Internet security and hence offers same level of protection for the components such as File antivirus, e-mail antivirus, and Web antivirus. Real time protection offers you protection from:

  •  Viruses and Worms
  • Trojans and Malicious tools
  • Adware and Auto-dialers
  • packed objects whose packing may be used to protect malicious code

The automatic disinfection works well in case of detection of any of the above mentioned objects.

Kaspersky Free Features

The features which are not available with Kaspersky Free Antivirus solution and are grayed out include:

  • Safe Money (Online Payment Protection)
  • Privacy Protection
  • Parental control
  • Protection for all devices
  • Application Control
  • Firewall
  • Private Browsing
  • Technical support
  • System Watcher

If you need any of these features, then you will need to upgrade to a paid antivirus solution such as Kaspersky Internet Security. But for an average user, the basic features that are offered with Kaspersky Free will be sufficient and are good enough compared to no Antivirus Security solution on the PC at all.

It also comes with loads of settings that you can customize, yet the default options will work for most users without the need to change anything. You can pause the Antivirus if you need for some program installation or some other situation, while the security levels can be adjusted if needed to high or low instead of the Recommended option.

If you check the additional protection and management tool settings, you will find that it includes  settings, you can manage features such as Kaspersky Security Network which gives access to cloud based knowledge lab of Kaspersky.

Kaspersky Free Performance

We did a full scan of our Windows PC system (C drive only) and it managed to complete that within few minutes. We didn’t measure the exact time, but it was less than 10 minutes for a full scan. It offers options for scan such as full scan, Quick Scan, selective scan and external device scan. You can even schedule a scan if you need to run Antivirus scan at regular intervals.

Also, the memory footprint on system is low and we didn’t feel any sluggishness or slow performance of the system while Kaspersky Free was running on the system.

Two good things about Kaspersky Free Antivirus solution is:

  • it does not show any third-party advertisements, and
  • does not collect your personal data.

These two features (if you like to call it that) even though do not add anything to the Antivirus capabilities, yet gives you assurance that your data is not being sold in some way and you can have a decent antivirus solution without looking at advertisements.

Conclusion

We found Kaspersky Free as a great antivirus solution in free category and in fact we plan to keep using it on our Windows Laptop as our Kaspersky Internet security license expired few weeks back. You can call it our bias towards Kaspersky, but we found Kaspersky Free a better product than any of the existing Free Antivirus solutions.