Great review avi. But, in my tests I observed few things contradictory to yours. The reason must be because I already had AVG Linkscanner installed, before installing AVG Free edition.

1. My Update size was just 15.3 MB against your 64 MB. I think the reason would be linkscanner. You've downloaded and installed all the components, whereas I already have linkscanner so it skipped linkscanner from downloading. Also, if you guys don't want to install linkscanner then you can choose Custom Install while installation and uncheck linkscanner. This may reduce the update size.

Apart from above point the performance results were same as avi said, in fact AVG took 30 MB on my Windows 7 and the usage while scanning was like what avi said. By default the scan was set to High Priority mode and hence it consumes more memory. So, if you want a balance between scanning and usability you can decrease the priority to Low Priority or Medium Priority.

I observed few other things, regarding the change of search engine etc... I'll update it here after checking and confirming those issues.

---------- Post added at 12:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:48 PM ----------

Another thing, the reason for that heavy offline installer may be attributed to linkscanner as it may be bundled with the offline installer of free edition. The offline installer of the linkscanner itself is around 76MB.