Some anti-virus programs cause more problems than they solve. Avast! Home Edition anti-virus is thankfully not one of those as it exceeds expectations while remaining free. Lightweight, vigilant and most importantly, effective, this could be the answer to your prayers if you’ve had no luck finding a virus checker you like.

The developers make a point of stressing that this program is strictly not for institutional use – it is designed specifically for the threats most home users face daily. Their philosophy is that efficient home virus protection is essential in preventing users one day being struck by a serious global virus. What impresses you immediately with Avast! is its vigilance. It’s likely that within minutes of installation, you’ll receive a pop up alert due to a Trojan or virus that had been incubating on your PC. If not, rest assured that it won’t be long before Avast! sets off its trademark siren and alerts you that something has been detected. The latest version of

Avast’s antivirus kernel promises 100% detection of ‘In-the-Wild’ viruses (viruses already spreading between users) and excellent detection of Trojan horses. Avast! provides 24 hour protection via its ‘On-Access’ scanner but you can initiate manual scans via the fairly simple user interface. You can start additional modules from here, such as the Virus Chest, Updater or Log Viewer. Another great feature of Avast! is the option to change the skin of this interface. The developer website features practically hundreds of distinctive designs made by aficionados and even offers a guide to designing your own.

Something often overlooked by major virus checking packages is P2P applications installed on your PC but Avast! covers this with a P2P and Instant Messenger shield. Whilst chat applications themselves do not impose any serious security risks in terms of viruses, their less sophisticated file sharing methods can easily lead to virus infections if not properly monitored. With so many infected files on P2P networks such as Kazaa and eMule too, it’s also good to know that Avast! won’t let you open them without quietly checking them first.

The program also features both a Web and Network shield that constantly monitors traffic. The Web Shield acts as a transparent HTTP proxy and is compatible with all major web browsers. One of the truly outstanding features of Avast! is that unlike heavyweights such as Kaspersky or Norton, you hardly notice it working in the background. This is because of a unique feature the developers call ‘Intelligent Stream Scan’ that scans objects on-the-fly, without needing to cache them locally. Even the virus updates are unobtrusive. Avast! downloads the updates gradually and only those that are absolutely essential instead of the whole database. You receive a ‘Virus database has been updated’ voice message every time this has been completed along with a small popup which you can turn off if it annoys you.

There really is little to fault Avast! on in a market that is saturated with too many ineffective virus checkers. Although it doesn’t guzzle resources, if you’re running it on an older machine, you might find it slows you down. Some new users also complain that conducting a simple manual scan is more complicated than it should be but if you’ve spent anytime with virus checkers, you’ll realise that its more than worth your while getting to know this excellent program.

Download Avast! Home 4.8.1229 in Softonic

PDF and DOC are probably the most common extensions for digital documents nowadays. This means that you need to have a PDF reader and a DOC-compatible app, or you're doomed.

Luckily there's another trick that enables you to read PDF, DOC and other popular document formats without having to install their associated software. Just use Text Mining Tool, a simple utility that extracts the text from any file you load on the program and displays it on its screen. Then you only have to save it as plain format or copy it directly to the Clipboard for later usage.

The program doesn't include any other configuration options, which keeps it very easy to use. On the downside, it lacks the possibility of customizing the output. During our tests, we ripped the text from a PDF document and the resulting TXT file was all garbled up when opened in Notepad (not when opened in Wordpad tough).

Text Mining Tool is a good choice for extracting text from PDF and DOC to plain files. Bear in mind that both format and images will be lost.

Download Text Mining Tool 1.1.42 in Softonic