Just in case you missed it, major security update.

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fausseplanete wrote on 10/25/2008, 12:58 AM
Got rid of Norton/Symantec due to slowness, crashes etc. as other users of my antivirus experience class seem also to find. No time and maybe insufficient memory to become & sustain being an antivirus and networking expert. Sometimes I follow instructions e.g. at grc.com but then a year or two later something doesn't work because of it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

Moved myself and others to AVG. Was good but Version 8 seems to me (and others on forums) to have become Norton-ish i.e. bloating too much. Like I disabled everything auto I could find but still avgrsx.exe ate up cpu in the middle of burning a CD and did it during a render the other day. Maybe time to move on again (ultimately to a Mac). Is Kapersky etc. any better?
farss wrote on 10/25/2008, 1:00 AM
"Is Kapersky etc. any better? "

Running it on several PCs, works a charm. Download demo and try for yourself.

Bob.
Terje wrote on 10/25/2008, 1:09 AM
Oh, and I have not done a single update in six years

Hmmm... I would tend to say that is bordering on nuts. I see you talk about virus infection later on. I don't know why people are so scared of a virus infection. Virii are a lot less of a problem than you might think. Zombie networks on the other hand is an issue. Anti-virus software doesn't catch zombie attacks since zombies do not use virii to infect your computer, they use known security issues with other software. XP SP1 has a lot of known security issues which means that your computer is dead easy to break into.

It may be that you have a firewall on your router and that this has shielded you from such attacks, but if you don't I would say there is a high probability your computer is part of a zombie network. Remember, you would never notice this, it doesn't have any noticeable impact on your computers operations. You'd only discover it if you actively went out looking for it.

Remember, if you buy a PC, configure it to run, connect it to the network but never do any thing else, not even log in, it will take, on average, less than one hour before that PC is part of a zombie network.
riredale wrote on 10/25/2008, 11:02 AM
Fausseplanete:

Which version of AVG8 are you running? I remember that the first time I "upgraded" to AVG8 the experience was a disaster, with the software taking 5 minutes to finish doing its thing during bootup. I went back to AVG7.5, but then read later on that AVG had taken user complaints to heart and had made significant changes. Now, for the past few months, all my machines are happily running AVG8 and I have no issues with resource-hogging.

As mentioned it is important during the install to choose the "custom" path and deselect the link monitor feature.
fausseplanete wrote on 10/25/2008, 2:49 PM
Riredale,

I am using v. 8.0.173 free and update frequently (manually).

If I disable Link Scanner from AVG's Control screen, should that have the same effect? I have already done that. And auto-updates (not too desirable during renders etc.)..

AVG is fine most of the time (though it did remove an app I bought and used years ago without obvious problems - must investigate when time permits), it's just that it lengthens the boot-up time i.e. time taken for cpu use to drop to 1 or 2 %, due to that mentioned exe.

Incidentally I upgraded the version because v7.5 updates were frequently requiring reboots, which I wonder were maybe a form of "nag" to update. A shame that the tray icon is changed. In v7.5 it intuitively indicated if update was required. Now it goes red (to indicate nanny's disapproval?) if you merely disable certain things on purpose. This continuous redness essentially hides proper alarms like the "needs updating" indication.

I get the overall sense that it's become a little too paranoid.
riredale wrote on 10/25/2008, 4:57 PM
AVG7.5 is going away in December, and they've been nagging users to switch over for months (I still have one machine on 7.5, because it's an XPsp1 machine while AVG8 requires sp2). I understand that AVG8 is a completely new engine.

You might want to uninstall and do a new install. I know it's possible to manually turn off certain functions but then you get the irritating red icon in the System Tray. This is one of the things fixed a few months ago, but I suspect you'll have to uninstall and reinstall to get the benefit. It's in the install that you're given the choice to disable the link monitor, and I just don't know if disabling it after-the-fact has the same effect.

As for auto-updates, AVG8 gives you a choice of timeframes. I think I have it set so that it does its thing in the early morning hours. All I know is that all the machines with AVG8 on them just keep humming along, and the System Tray icon is always happy, so I'm happy.

Oh, I may have mentioned earlier that the earlier version of AVG8 really took a long time to boot. No so any more. I don't see any delays at all attributable to the software.

Hope this helps. It's nice to have healthy competition in this niche of the software industry. Lots of choices.