homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II Here's what happened (Continued)

Folks,

Dux:

I dunno Pal. No one should care what I think,; I'm no experten when it comes to virus checkers. However I had much the same situation with the paid version of Norton before I moved to the free version of AVG. Norton started charging for their weekly virus database upgrades. Fair or not, this irritated me so much I un-installed Norton and I spitefully switched to AVG FREE. AVG did a great job for years. But lately AVG has become bloated and it's main defense against nefarious files seems to me to be that it now crowds them out.

It takes forever to scan. The newest version of AVG is supposed to address the issues of slow running by arbitrarily choosing not to check certain files it deems "safe" from attack. How wise is this trade-off? Frankly it is checking less files now yet I have noticed no speed-up what-so-ever.

Perhaps some free software is only worth what you pay for it? I have many free programs that are quite valuable to me. Some free software is filled with ad ware, some have other agendas, but on the whole I have had a good experience with free software. I support the free source projects that are springing up across the Internet. Projects like Gimp, Blender and many others. They provide a service to those who cannot afford the paid programs they emulate.

We all benefited when the source code for Rowan's BoB was released, eh? At the same time I heartily agree that those who work hard to produce a fine software product deserve to be fairly compensated. Gone forever are those heady days of yesterday. I have good memories of Buttonware and such who pioneered shareware in the 80's. Back then you could download or otherwise obtain very good software on a 'try it first and pay me later' based purely on faith.

I continue to use AVG FREE and it IS free so I seldom complain. However I suspect that either it is useless or something has crippled even my newest version of AVG Free which is 9. Although hardly a week goes by that I don't download something from the Internet; it never finds anything anymore, not even after an upgrade. Of course C51, I heard that snide remark, finding nothing is indeed precisely what I should want. Provided of course there is nothing to be found.

Someone has advised me to try Avast. I may do that. I've read that AVG is not all that easy to completely remove and most similar software will not install if there is even a smidgen of AVG left behind. Naturally I have many other sweepers and cleaners I use as well. One of the best that keeps on finding a few things is Malwarebytes. I can unreservedly recommend that free program.

For some reason the new version of AVG is incompatible with my file manager which is PowerDesk Pro 5. Summoning the r-click context menu kept crashing the program. I had to rename a specific AVG .dll file to sort that out and now there is no "check this file with AVG" listed in the context menu but the crashes have stopped. I can almost as easily check files otherwise but I'm not happy with it. This seems to be caused by a bug in the newest version of AVG 9 (free and paid). An upgrade to a later version of PD5 might correct the problem but I'll wait for Grisoft to wake up and fix it since I am contemplating a change anyway. I have read that they are receiving many complaints.