AVG no longer our friend?

[solweb]

I moved to Avast a while ago and have no problems, in fact Avast Free has picked up problems that other (Paid) Antit Virus have overlooked.

A good place to get information is http://www.techsupportalert.com/

[tec0]

Well AVG 2011 is running at the moment but I am not happy with the big updates. So I will stick to my guns AVG WAS good until it started to cost me more then what it is worth.

Spending half a GB on updates alone is madness. It is a shame because I liked AVG a lot, it used to be small the updates used to be small but now it is just another 1 ton application slowing down my internet and feeding on my bandwidth.

Avast is about the get another customer.

[Dave A]

I found the 'free AVG' was slowing my internet connection down as it filtered everything all the time, I thought by buying the real version it would help but it didn't.

If you're not a reckless browser wandering around hairy parts of the internet, disable the link scanner to get rid of that problem.

[irneb]

I found the 'free AVG' was slowing my internet connection down as it filtered everything all the time, I thought by buying the real version it would help but it didn't.
I have been using 'Avast free' for the last year and find it much better.

If you check the thread linked to in my previous post, you'll note I had the enterprise edition AVG for all the PC in our office. At least then we could get the updates onto our own server and have the PCs update from there (instead of doing 60+ updates each over our broadband). But even the paid-for (R29000 / year) Enterprise Edition AVG was not catching everything Avast! did, and it was not catching everything while hogging the PC's RAM & CPU as well as the internet connection.

I moved to Avast a while ago and have no problems, in fact Avast Free has picked up problems that other (Paid) Antit Virus have overlooked.

A good place to get information is http://www.techsupportalert.com/

Exactly! That's one of my major reasons for loving it!

If you're not a reckless browser wandering around hairy parts of the internet, disable the link scanner to get rid of that problem.

Why should you need to do that? Don't you usually install an AV because you want to be protected? To install something, simply to disable it because it's overly hogging your system is defeating its purpose isn't it?

Avast! catches the same stuff (if not more) than AVG's internet connection snooping. It also pops up displaying stuff like untrusted (or un-recommended) web sites, same as AVG's bull-dog used to do. Only it doesn't kill your connection like AVG did.

I'm of the opinion that these AV's become bloated after a few years. For whatever reason, their creators start focussing on stuff like look and feel, making "pretty" dialogs, etc. Instead of focusing on making the program run as unobtrusively as possible and catching as many mal-items as they can. It's a dammed background-process dammit! Not a game, not an AV (as in Audio Visual app), not a graphics editor, it's something in the order of a service. It should run with absolute minimal UI (only the needed message boxes to display information when there's something WRONG!). The settings should be done through a minimal dialog - maybe even something directly inside the Control Panel. The UI shouldn't be the biggest portion of the program. And AVG is a perfect example of the UI becoming much more important to the programmers than the actual purpose of the program itself.

Yet even Avast! has a skinned look-n-feel (like AVG does), only they've been able to do so using a lot less resources. I'd have liked to see something like Clamwin (with a truly minimalist UI) be capable of a true AV/Anti Malware/Anti Spam/etc. like these other AV's. That would make for an AV which is focused on being an AV, not a pretty picture! Otherwise you end up with these scenarios where you have to turn stuff off simply to make the thing work decently.

So I'm even scared that Avast!'s moving towards this bloated UI-driven AV - if you look at its UI you see a lot of design's gone into it. That only means to me that the programmers' have spent a lot of their time making pretty pictures instead of making the program as robust and efficient as possible. At least Avast!'s not reached AVG's level of bloat (yet)! Maybe in a year or two they'll become the bloated box of useless, I hope not though! They've been in business for quite a while now, so maybe they're not moving to that particular nettle of thorns, one can hope

[Dave A]

If you're not a reckless browser wandering around hairy parts of the internet, disable the link scanner to get rid of that problem.

Why should you need to do that? Don't you usually install an AV because you want to be protected? To install something, simply to disable it because it's overly hogging your system is defeating its purpose isn't it?

It's not hogging resources on your PC - it's the check-with-AVG-server-for-a-scan-on-the-fly result time for the specific URL that causes the delay. If you look at all the steps in that, and the number of trips up and down our wonderful international connections, little wonder response is slow.

I'm of the opinion that these AV's become bloated after a few years.

Yeah - I agree. Remember when AVG was saving us from the bloat of Norton's...

So I'm even scared that Avast!'s moving towards this bloated UI-driven AV

Based on track record of all the others, probably