Some people say they’re never in it for the awards.

On one hand, I agree with them. Striving for excellence means striving for real excellence—not for awards designating it so.

But they’re still nice to get. When accepted along with all the positive feedback we get from our community of 128 million of users, awards help validate all the effort we put into protecting people and their families online.

That’s why I was excited to receive a PC Pro Excellence Award on behalf of AVG after PC Pro found AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012 to be the best free security software available.

The PC Pro Excellence Awards are the results of months of feedback from the magazine’s labs and website readers. With 20 categories and at least five questions in each category, PC Pro gives a pretty good picture of the UK’s tech buying habits. After asking readers to rate each product on performance, reliability, value and other factors, they converted this feedback into an overall score.

This means a lot to us, because the PC Pro Excellence Awards isn’t just about one organization’s experience with AVG Free—it’s about how much AVG Free has helped people. But we still take pride in the fact that AVG Free protected PC Pro’s test machine against 98% of the malware they themselves tried taking down the machine with. In their own words, “While it might lack the features of a fully fledged security suite, it performs the core job of PC protection admirably.”

Let me remind you this is a free product. If you’re going online without a safety net, now is the time to ask yourself why!

Do you have any questions about keeping you and your families safe online and on mobile devices? Let me know here, on Twitter, or Facebook.