AVG no longer our friend?

[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

[SilverNodashi]

Yes AVG free Edition was always considered our friend, you can get it for free and mostly the updates weren’t that big. But all of that is gone now. When I upgraded to AVG 2011 it took in total about 300MB from my 3G’s 1 GB cap and then it continued with 33.8Mb updates along with a few others.

Now as we all know our internet service providers are greedy selfish maggots that feed on the poor South African by forcing them to pay R300 more or less for 1GB of data. In that regard the old AVG was golden it didn’t eat as much.

But all of that is gone now... the New AVG is hungry and its updates just made it unusable to the general public. I say this because the 33mb update fails halfway and then it restarts and it fails and it restarts eating away at your cap. In one night I have used 600MB on AVG? That is just messed up!!!!

So are there any recommendations on other free antivirus software or is disconnecting from the net and using VR computers our only option?

so is it the ISP's fault that AVG is now not an option for you anymore?
Why don't you use ADSL / iBurst / Neotel / etc?

And, Vodadom has (had?) a nightowl thing where if you purchased 1GB, you get 1GB free after hours - which is perfect for updates and stuff

[Cream]

This has been an interesting read, I have been looking for an upgrade from AVG and here it is. Our team has suggested doing research of their own on AVG and Avast, we may just publish there findings on our new forum.

[Martinco]

I have also installed Avast and I am impressed !

Very easy to use and if you are running a network it is easy to include a scan on all computers on the network thereby eliminating one PC contaminating the others.

[tec0]

so is it the ISP's fault that AVG is now not an option for you anymore?
Why don't you use ADSL / iBurst / Neotel / etc?

And, Vodadom has (had?) a nightowl thing where if you purchased 1GB, you get 1GB free after hours - which is perfect for updates and stuff

Fact is we pay way too much and the biggest and only real provider Telkom have neglected to install ADSL capability in our aria for the last few years now. Also I find AVG is nagging whenever I use a trainer for a game or something like that. It just became a very unhappy antivirus.

[Cream]

So we spent time today researching the two and our post covered the features and performance of AVG and Avast. Our vote so far is currently 1 all :-)

[AndyD]

Also I find AVG is nagging whenever I use a trainer for a game or something like that....

The new avg has a 'gaming mode' specifically to stop notices and nagging during game play. Have you activated this feature?

Here's a link with more info. http://www.avg.com/ww-en/faq?num=2116

Not suggesting your game is non-genuine but all anti virus applications will give false positives for game cracks which behave as a 'loader' environment type script and are often deployed to circumvent piracy protection which is written into the game. Also some no-cd-cracks and game server emulators can cause the same problem. These scripts would need to be specifically excluded from real time and scheduled scanning.

[tec0]

The truth is I had to crack my original Starcraft to get it working in offline mode. But even then I still feel cheated because the game cost a lot of money to buy and then to crack the damn thing to get it to work was really in bad taste.

But yes I have noticed that AVG sees everything as a fret especially game trainers game mode or no game mode just downloading the trainer is a problem you don’t even get the chance to use it. And it really points to AVG as the problem.

It feels like Microsoft and now AVG is trying to take ownership of my computer telling me what to do as if it is there property. I own my computer I own my software I allow AVG on my system but they just act as if everything belongs to them.

Steam especially has a god-complex about their games when you buy a steam game you don’t even get a finished product you have to download the other half of the damn thing and Thor forbid if you have to format or lose your password.

Really the whole thing actually sucks...

Because of steam I am moving over to PS3. Commuter games are dead as far as I am concern.

First MS gives Errors and blue screens forever nagging about the net, Steam are just a bunch of nerds with a real god-complex problem they think they can screw your wife and you must be happy with it.

But AVG I am truly disappointed with. It restarts after every update almost... it is heavy on bandwidth and it cries wolf every chance it gets.