Designer’s Dilemma

I’ve been using AVG free for a couple of years now and I must say I really am satisfied with the product, up until AVG 7.5. Then came AVG 8, with free AntiSpyware bundled to its home edition. I’ve read reviews, and surfed the web for comments from AVG free users such as myself, and I must say that all I could find was positive comments from different users, a few bad feedbacks but none of some real bearing. So that was it for me, I decided to tryout the new version of AVG (actually, that and the prompt I keep getting from my 7.5 version to upgrade to 8). So there I was, after downloading and installing the new and improved AVG 8, which by the way automatically uninstalls your AVG antispyware (if you have it installed already), I was impressed with its new look and feel - somewhat web2.0-ish, pretty trendy for an antivirus eh? What got to me was this new feature that checks for phishing sites and other virus prone locations in the internet while you browse your way through search engines. Sure, I appreciate the feature from a virus paranoid user’s point of view, but as a web surfer - I Hated it, with all my guts…. It made me feel that my web experience is being compromised as my subconscious tells me to wait for the results (see if its a secure site) before clicking on the websites from google or yahoo, which actually takes time and made my browsing much much slower than usual.

Well some of you are probably saying: “Well, if you don’t like a feature, quit whining and simply turn it off!”. And that I did… So what happened next? not much really, the icon on my right hand tray just changed to an exclamation point on top of the usual AVG tray icon, saying that your computer is at risk or something like that… which in turn, made me say to myself: “Wow, this antivirus is really demanding, it does not only want to interfere with my internet experience but also tell me how I should run my own PC…”

Which was quite alright until I got it running for about 2 to 3 more days, when suddenly the real problem started to happen… I’m not really sure how, but I believe AVG 8 to be somewhat incompatible with Firefox (using the latest) browser, which incidentally happened to be my choice of browser, as my Firefox began experiencing errors while I was browsing forcing the window to shut down. The worst part is that even with Firefox’s recovery system that allow users to restore sessions in case something like this happens, it (AVG stops it from recovering and shuts it down over and over again… The Solution: Restart the Computer.

So what I did next was to uninstall my AVG 8 to see if this firefox error still appear, and guess what? After running it for two days, nothing….. so I assumed it to be the antivirus’ fault, that is until I re-installed it, that I proved to myself that the new AVG is nothing more but a hype, and shouldn’t really be launched as a stable version - but that’s just me…. feel free to read more reviews from the net, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of good reviews for it…

Oh, and one more thing, I really hate the fact that when AVG launches a new version, they completely drop support for their previous versions and stick to their latest, so if you’re an AVG 6 or 7 user, you really don’t have a choice (if you want your virus database to be up-to-date) but to follow the latest stable version. If you don’t believe me, try downloading an older version of AVG from their own website…… because as far as I can remember, when I wanted to downgrade to 7.5 from version 8, I downloaded my AVG 7+ version from a third party website simply because I couldn’t find it anymore in their main site….

By the way, I’m using AVIRA now……………………… still not sure whether I made the right choice though, but for now, ANYTHING is better than AVG 8….. If you have suggestions on what’s the best antivirus software (freeware), please don’t hesitate to post, as I’m very much open to suggestions regarding this…

Filed under: Personal on June 14th, 2008