I don’t usually plan my blog posts, they just come to me when I sit at my PC, usually when I see some crap in the news or some experience happens to me.
This post is about something I experienced the day before yesterday.
For years I have been using the excellent AVG Free antivirus. Lately though, I have become rather disenchanted with it for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I hate bloated software, that is software of very large size that has no new benefits. Hence I use Nero 6 instead of newer versions, where version 6 is about 35 Mb and other versions after are close to a whopping 200 Mb.
Anyway, AVG rose to a massive 60 Mb in the last few months, turning me off on the size issue. Then too, it started behaving a bit too erratic for me; I write batch files to automate several repeatable tasks on my PC, and AVG picks them up as viruses (because they make simple system changes).
This irritates me to no end. Then too, it has started reporting false positives on spyware found, when both Spybot and Ad-Aware find none. I was turned off McAfee and PC-Cillin for the same reasons.
So the day before yesterday, I uninstalled AVG and installed Avast Home edition which is free also. I have to say, I was rather astonished, and pleased.
In the first 4 minutes of scanning, Avast found a hidden rootkit on my system, which was never picked up by AVG. Then too, it has audio prompts when it updates and also when it finds anything out of kilter. And at about 32 Mb, it comes closer to what I think an antivirus should be. Plus, it doesn’t try to do more than be a antivirus, that is, try to be a firewall, antispyware etc., all at the same time.
The updates are very small, just mere Kb in size, and are available often.
Best of all, did I mention it is totally free? Only a free registration is required.
