Windows bashing was: Re: Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Tony Baechler]

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As I said, my experience with AVG was many years ago on Windows 98, so
perhaps some of the issues are fixed nowadays.  My machine didn't totally
lock up, but it was so slow that it might as well have.  I could just plan
on not having my machine for about 15 minutes and there seemed to be no
way to stop it.  I looked into it last year for my brother's Windows 7
notebook and it wasn't recommended.  Norton Internet Security and
Microsoft Security Essentials seemed to be the recommended options, so we
went with Norton because it's relatively cheap and the notebook is for
business.  AVG was not free for personal use as I recall, but after not
only my problems with it but reading about several other people having
problems and several months going by with no updates, I assumed it was
dead.  I thought I read that you had to pay some nominal fee even for
personal use, but that could be wrong.  I know that it isn't licensed for
a business which was the main concern.  I liked the looks of Nod32, but it
was too expensive compared to Norton and the other options.  As it turned
out, his Norton expired and he's onto something else anyway.  Avast now
seems to be the recommended personal free virus scanner.

On my machine here, I actually do have a virus scanner installed, but I
don't run it in the background.  It's called ClamWin and is the same as
clamav but for Windows.  It works well enough for me without constantly
running and eating up resources while still scanning downloads and zip
files.  I almost never open email attachments, so that isn't an issue here.

On 5/11/2013 5:35 PM, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 01:13:16AM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
>> AVG is now pretty much dead and it was the antivirus which totally
>> made my machine come to a complete stop at 8 AM daily.  OK, it turned
>> out that it's a scheduling "feature" which is part of AVG, but I
>> couldn't turn it off.  I could change when it ran, but no matter
>> what, it was going to do a full virus scan every day whether I liked
>> it or not.  So much for me controlling the machine, but that's 
>> typical Windows behavior.
> 
> What do you mean when you say that AVG is pretty much dead? I use 
> AVG-free on one of my machines here, and it still seems to be very much
> alive. It has definition updates daily as far as I can tell. It also
> seems to come out with a minor version upgrade about every half a year,
> and with a major version upgrade about once a year.
> 
> As far as your box locking up, you must have been running on a very
> old machine. I'm running AVG-free 2013 on a 2.2GHz pentium IV single
> core with no hyperthreading, and one gig of RAM. The machine doesn't
> fly while doing virus scanning, but it's still quite useable, and
> fairly responsive. As far as scheduling full virus scans, it is
> possible to schedule both how often AVG-free runs them, and at what
> time of day. I have mine scheduled to run once a week for instance.
> Guess what? You can even turn off full virus scanning completely if you
> don't want it to run at all on any schedule.
> 
> I'm not trying to defend AVG-free. Like many things, it isn't perfect.
> I do know from personal experience though that your statements above
> aren't correct regarding the latest version of AVG-free. As far as
> controlling your machine, I'll admit that windows doesn't give you as
> much control as GNU/Linux does. Having said that, I still maintain that
> windows, and AVG-free give the user quite a bit of control. I would say
> it gives the user more control than it doesn't. It's just a matter of
> knowing what to set, and where, and the internet is your friend here if
> your own knowledge comes up short.
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