Avira Free Security Suite 2017 (or Avira Connect) is the latest free antivirus suite from Avira. It has four free products that can be used separately. It includes free antivirus, Phantom VPN, System Speedup, and Browser Safety products. So, it can protect your PC from viruses, ransomware attack, and malware, help to optimize your PC speed, protect you from malicious sites and provide free VPN to access the blocked websites.
All these tools can be launched from a single interface, known as “Avira Connect“. Launch any tool and use it as per your need. You don’t have to use all tools. If you don’t want to use a particular tool, you can simply uninstall it. Those using Avira already know about these tools, but other users who are new to Avira can try this new Avira Free Security Suite 2017 to avail the benefit of four different tools in a single package.
Above you can see the main interface of Avira Free Security Suite using which you can launch any tool.
How To Use Avira Free Security Suite 2017?
You can open the homepage of this suite and download its installer. Run the installer and it will install all the products one after another. Your system may hang during the installation process. Also, the installation process is a bit lengthy. Even if there is some interruption in the installation process, Avira Connect interface will open and installation of other products will continue in the background.
When the installation process is completed, you can open any tool and use it. Let’s have a look at these main tools.
Avira Free Antivirus With Real-Time Protection from Viruses and Malware:
Avira Free Antivirus is not a new name. It competes very well with other best free antivirus software and helps to protect your PC from viruses and malware in real-time. You can also start the quick or detailed scan. Also, on-demand scan can also be performed for local drives, My Documents, active processes, etc.
All the main information like PC Protection and Internet Protection status is visible on the main interface. Other features like start scanning on scheduled time, view scan reports, etc., are also available.
You may read its full review here.
Browser Safety Tool To Protect You from Tracking and Malicious Websites:
Browser Safety tool is a very good tool as it detects website safety in real-time. It installs as an extension on the web browsers that are installed on your PC. Whenever you try to access a malicious website, it shows a warning message, just like it is visible in the screenshot below.
Apart from that, it also blocks tracking if some website tries to track your online activity. Moreover, it also shows if a website is safe and tracks you or not.
I can say this tool works very well and can protect you when you are browsing sites. You can also set some options like enable/disable block trackers by default, send or don’t send do not track header, show/hide safety indicator, etc.
Protect Your Privacy and Access Blocked Websites Using Avira Phantom VPN:
Phantom VPN is another handy tool that can help you protect your privacy by making your connection private and lets you bypass geo-restrictions. You can select from the available virtual locations like USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Brazil, etc., and access websites that are blocked in your country.
However, there is a limitaion that you can use up to 500 MB data per month using this VPN tool for free. You can extend this limit by 1 GB/month by registring for free with Avira.
So, this tool is good only for occasional uses. I will recommend you to go for Hola or other VPN software. To learn more about this tool, you can read this detailed review.
Avira System Speedup:
This is also a useful tool, but the suite includes its trial version only. You can use it to optimize PC speed only once. After that, you have to buy the tool. This tool scans disk, checks performance, and privacy related issues, and helps to fix them. It finds junk items, registry errors, fragmented files, and lets you optimize the PC.
The tool is a good option, but it will of no use after one optimization. So, I would recommend you to use other best free PC speedup software.
The Verdict:
Based on my personal experience, I can say this free Avira Security Suite 2017 is a good option to try. However, I found it to be a bit towards higher side in terms of memory consumption, so if your PC has less RAM, you might want to skip this.
