Getting Avira Antivir Personal FREE Edition to work with Windows Server 2008.

So you're after a good FREE antivirus to use with your Windows 2008 machine?

When it comes to free antivirus, and my personal preference in free antivirus is Avira Antivir Personal, it's very effective and has a pretty small footprint in terms of resources.

But alas, Avira can't be installed on Windows Server 2008, and I your like me that just uses 2008 as a workstation OS, that's a real bummer.

But there is hope, you can get Avira to install and run in Windows 2008, in only a few simple steps.

Now if you just download the installer from www.avira.com and try to run it you get an error message saying something along the lines of  ' this product can't be installed onto a server os' or something along those lines. What you need to do is deny it from checking part of your OS version.

So, this is what you need to do:

Step 1 - Create a User account..
First up you need to create a seperate user account, just call it "User" , the account must be an Administrator. You can do this by going to Control Panel -> Users.

Step 2 - Set registry permissions.
Now, still logged in as your default Adminitrator account, fire up regedit(start->run->regedit) and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions
Right-click the ProductOptions folder(in the left hand pane) and click permissions. With the permissions window open, click Add->Find Now and scroll down and select the User account you just created. Make sure you select User and not Users. Once the User account is added to the list, select it, then set the permissions for the account(in the bottom pane) to Deny everything. Click Ok. You'll get a couple of messages about setting the permissions just click ok to them.

Step 3 - Logon as User
Logoff your default Administrator account and log back in using the User account you created.

Step 4 - Install Avira
Now you should be able to install Avira from your User account. Don't worry, it installs the application for all users, so it'll be there for your default administrator account too.

Step 5 - Clean up.
Once that's finished installing log back in as Administrator, make sure the antivirus is all working nicely. You can then go ahead and revert all the changes you made in steps 1 and 2. That's it.