Strength:
Ashampoo Anti-virus provides a comprehensive protection against spyware, viruses, worms, Trojans, etc; it’s an easy-to-use program with amazingly nice interface. The new version updates daily, along with its firewall as well as anti-spyware, which are qualified to protect our systems from danger.

Weakness:
It takes long to scan completely, and the stability needs improving, for it may crash with other programs.

Benefits
This product is well improved. I have AVG Anti-virus 7.5 to protect my system, as there are lots of people recommend it. Till recent days I have found that AVG lacks the function of anti-spyware. What a serious deficienticy it has! It’s known to all that spyware is one of the most severe illicit programs, with which our systems may become vulnerable and be attacked by unidentified programs.

Luckily, Ashampoo Anti-virus V1.5 offers us antispyware. The earlier version of Ashampoo didn’t combine antispyware to this program, so it is an economical and convenient product for users. By the way, the free trial version is a 10-day use; if you register online, you could get 30-day-use validity (also free). By the way, this trial version is a full-function one, which is different from many trial ones that set limitations to users.

I tried another anti-virus tool to protect my system that lacks quarantine zone; the weakness was that some files were deleted automatically. Fortunately this program has quarantine area to keep my infected files away from the healthy ones.
The real-time protection is always on—whenever your system is on, real-time protection is there. This program fits users who are always online to deal with matters. Also, the daily update is worth mentioning—the virus signatures are updated several times a day, the program checks for updates automatically as well, even per hour if you’d like to.


Setup
The size of installation kit is about 20.6MB. The installation is easy, straightforward as well. It does take a few minutes to install this program because of its size. Once we finish the installation, reboot is required before we use this tool.
Should you want to remove it some day, there is a quick door for users to uninstall. Then, reboot your computer after the prompts. There would be an empty folder left—if you want to reinstall, the folder is useful for the second installation; while you do not want it any more, just delete it.

Interface
If you have seen the anti-spyware tool from Ashampoo, then you also know the looks of the anti-virus. The interface is not a skinnable one--it looks like the anti-spyware - a menu bar and six major areas - Main Menu, Scan, Schedule, Quarantine, Report and Preferences. Let’s start to see it closer.

The Main Menu area is used for getting information about the program's previous activity, update status and for starting various tasks. The real-time protection, called Anti-virus Guard, can be enabled and disabled here with a single mouse click. The daily automatic updates can be enabled or disabled and you can also start different scanning tasks here. The number of viruses currently recognized by the program and the date of the last update can also be found out inside the Main Menu, as well as the number of scans performed, engine version number, amount of infections found and removed.

Next, as usual, we find the Scan area. There is a full system scan mode available and six selective scan modes - memory, system areas, all hard drives, scan removable drives, CD-ROMs and custom folders scan. The same problem that I had with the antispyware occurred here - the scan process was pretty boring, but if you schedule your full system scan for the next time, you shouldn't care much about that.

The next area is, naturally, Schedule. There's nothing special to say about it, and I can't expect more from such a feature than to do its job.
Quarantine and Logs are the next two areas that I like to see clear of any data, and the reason should be obvious...Anyway, you don't have any reason to worry about their functionality, and everything’s just fine here.

This program's Preferences area has a single screen with settings very easy to understand for everybody that allow you to choose scan updates and heuristics options.

System Requirements
This facility could run on Windows 2000/XP/Vista. The size of it is about 21MB and I suggest that leave more for its update. There is no requirement for RAM, yet 128MB or higher could qualify.

Conclusion
Ashampoo Anti-virus V1.5 is an easy-to-use tool which fits newbie very well. This unique anti-virus program excels at its gorgeous interface and improved functions. Though it would become a resource hog for the first time scan, you could ignore this facility when it works for next time.

“Back in the days when we only had a few viruses to worry about, AV software was so small and lightweight we barely noticed it running”—this is an advanced user commented on anti-virus programs. From the implied words, we can infer that the size of an anti-virus tool becomes more and more heavy; as a result, there would be some system impacts of anti-virus programs, which we called resource hogs.

This program is a little lighter than a common anti-virus tool; therefore it would not hog resources too much. This tool, yet fails in the compatibility with system—crash is a headache. I believe there will be a better version to revise the problem.