Avira Antivirus Free Version

Avira Operations GmbH & Co. KG is a German multinational and family owned antivirus software company. With an estimated 9.6% of the global market share according to OPSWAT, and over 100 million customers, Avira is considered the sixth largest antivirus vendor worldwide.
The company supports the Auerbach Stiftung, a foundation created by the company's founder and CEO, Tjark Auerbach. It promotes charitable and social projects as well as the arts, culture and science.

Avira , which were first launched in 1986, are based on a scan engine named "Luke Filewalker", referring to Luke Skywalker. On 17 October 2008, a major update to the scan engine was released, which increased scanning speed by 20%.
Avira competes in the antivirus industry against BullGuard, F-Secure, Frisk, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro among others.

Avira periodically "cleans out" the virus definition files, by replacing specific signatures with generic ones, resulting in a general increase in performance and scanning speed. A database clean-out with the size of 15 MB was made on 27 October 2008, causing problems to the users of the Free edition because of its large size and slow servers of the Free edition. To solve the issue, Avira improved the updating process by reducing the size of the individual updatable files, resulting in the delivery of less data in each update. Nowadays there are 32 smaller definition files that are updated regularly in order to avoid peaks in the download of the updates.