Windows 8 support in Avira Antivirus

Avira Free Antivirus now officially supports Windows 8 and has been Microsoft-certified. According to Avira, its home and business products will also receive certification shortly, though this could take a few weeks, as the certification process usually takes some time. Avira had originally planned to resolve its compatibility problems in the first quarter of 2013 – Windows 8 was released on 26 October 2012.

Following the autumn release of Windows 8, Avira was forced to inform customers that its software had some compatibility problems. Updating from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on systems on which Avira was installed resulted in the blue screen of death. The company set up a help page describing the steps required to uninstall the anti-virus software from a computer that was non-bootable after upgrading. Manual updates delivering improved compatibility were made available in December.