What's going on with AVG?

[P.Pilcher]

I have been a user of AVG free for a very long time with few problems. However, a month or so ago, my wife complained that her computer would start up and then crash as soon as the "boot up" of XP Pro was complete. The cycle repeated itself ad infinitum. Investigation in Safe Mode revealed that the culprit was AVG and on replacing this with Avast, normal services resumed without any viruses being found by Avast's "bootup scan"
Over the last weekend AVG has been complaining that it is unable to update itself on my laptop. There has been no change which could have caused this and meticulous checking of firewall and other malware defending software has not revealed any blocking of AVG's attempts to contact its own update website. Again the usual AVG websites have been normally accessible. In desparation, I deleted AVG and downloaded the latest free version. This installed normally - but again refused to update itself. I then checked my desktop machine and this copy of AVG updated normally. This morning, the problem has spread to my desktop and shortly I expect Avast will be installed on this machine as well. Does anybody know what is happening? Are AVG getting fed up with all of us "free" users and have decided that we will now have to pay for their service? There is no indication of this on their free.avg..com website.

P.P.

[Cornish Jack]

Very similar problems recently and suspect that AVG are, indeed, dumping their free users. Have used them for years and I'm sure that until very recently they didn't have a UK website. They have now, and any attempts to update or install AVG free with them gets thrown out. Great pity - it used to be a very reassuring, unobtrusive AV program. Avast seems to work OK but one could NEVER accuse it of being unobtrusive!!:sad:

[frostbite]

Aside from the update notification I never see anything from Avast.

In what way obtrusive?

[Loose rivets]

Yes, I'm running Avast, having given up on AVG. I certainly attempted to not have ANY automatic / times functions at all, but CCleaner shows quite a lot of stuff loaded in the Start menu etc.. Other than that, seems to be quite pleasant to use.


Back to AVG. Well, I'm always surprised when software houses give so much for so little. Nowt, in my case. Obviously if a promotional product is so good that no one buys the real thing, they're on a hiding to nothing, financially. However, I wish they'd been more open about it. If for instance they'd suggested a $10 donation...on a "If you are please with our product." basis, I for one would have paid that for the reduced package. Possibly even upgraded, but having said that, my pal did buy the full soft with his new laptop, and I never really got it running as well as the old Freebie! Quite a statement, that, when you wonder why AVG is losing credibility.

[Tarq57]

Haven't heard that AVG is dumping the free users, however it seems plausible that the servers for updates to the free versions are likely overtaxed at times. For some reason it is the most popular free AV on Cnet.:confused:
For those that don't want to change AV's, just periodically keep trying to update. Eventually it'll happen....
For those that do, I'm 100% happy with Avast, Avira (http://www.free-av.com/) also has a very satisfied user base, with the most frequent complaint a browser nag screen during updates.

[P.Pilcher]

Since I started this thread with my suspicions with AVG, the problem has continued to bother me. I had run my antispyware suite, Malwarebytes,Superantispyware and Spyware Terminator without result previously but yesterday, I removed AVG and installed Avast. I took the option of doing a full bootup scan before XP started, but this also brought up nothing as did a repeat scan when Avast had settled in and updated itself. I noted also that Spyware Terminator considered itself up to date but there appeared to be a problem with the updates for Malwarebytes and Superantispyware. The latter stated that updates were available, but on clicking on the update facility, a screen stating "updating" appeared and indications that a download was taking place were seen, but these continued for an hour without any further developments! Malwarebytes could not access its update server and accused me of changing my firewall settings. The problem persisted even when I disabled my windows firewall. After much messing around, I decided to delete Malwarebytes and upload the latest version which I hoped would be more up to date than the one I had already been using. This proved not to be a problem, but it reported an error as it installed itself. This did not fortunately stop it running, so I used this new version to perform a scan. Within munutes it had found about 5 trojans in the win32 section of XP. Some were deleted and others moved to the virus vault when I used the automatic facility for curing the infection. Then a restart was required. I did this with a little trepidation anticipating the probable use of my bootup disk to repair windows, but no - everything started up correctly. On checking, immediately after this, Avast immediately declared that it had updated itself, Spyware terminator declared itself in need of updates which it promptly downloaded. Superantispyware again reminded me that it needed updates and on clicking on the update facility this time, said updates were promptly downloaded and the software was updated in minutes. Finally, Malwarebytes no longer had problems with my "firewall" and was able to obtain its own updates as well. If I re-load AVG, I expect that this will probably update as well!
Where had these trojans come from? Obviously they were new as AVG did not spot them in the first place and they were sufficiently sophisticated to stop it, and much of my other antispyware arsenel from updating itself to ensure that they were never detected. These viruses seemed to have done little else to my machine. I have had no unexpected popups or any other form of unwelcome advertising. There is no evidence that my address book has been transmitted elsewhere or that a keylogger has sent my confidential information to any unauthorised location - but I haven't checked my bank account today yet!

P.P.

[Ancient Observer]

Thanks for the interesting piece. As I use AVG, I went to look to see whether or not I had any of these issues. Thankfully, I do not. Thus, what you are encountering is not an everyone problem. I'll keep an eye on it and let you know if it happens to me!
all the best

[ExGrunt]

@P.Pilcher

What you describe sounds very like the conficker virus, often spread by usb memory sticks:

If your computer is infected with this worm, you may not experience any symptoms, or you may experience any of the following symptoms:

Account lockout policies are being tripped.
Automatic Updates, Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), Windows Defender, and Error Reporting Services are disabled.
Domain controllers respond slowly to client requests.
The network is congested.
Various security-related Web sites cannot be accessed.

You might want to check any usb sticks you have. Note just pluging an infected stick in may re-infect your system.

One safe way to read the sticks is to boot a livecd version of linux on your PC and read the sticks under linux

[Avitor]

I moved from AVG to Avast. "In what way is it intrusive"? Whatever you surf, avast will jump in before you to have a little check up, you will see the little globe on the task bar spinning, it will update every day, sometimes more than once, and slow you down for perhaps a minute whilst it does so, the globe again spinning.
If I were to award percentage marks, avast would hit 100. It is as good as one can get.. imho.

...and free.

[ericlday]

Avitor...I am with you all the way on this one, my experience so far is good.

[P.Pilcher]

ExGrunt: Thanks for the advice. I don't need to use memory sticks with my applications, so these viruses must have got in from t'internet under AVG's protection screen. As they must have disabled AVG's ability to update then they must have been pretty new as that problem only appeared on my main machine last weekend. Furthermore a freshly downloaded copy of Avast did not spot them either - though it probably would have done once it had updated itself, but after its unsuccessful bootup scan the other day, it found nothing when it had updated and a further full scan was run. Fortunately for me a freshly downloaded copy of Malwarebytes did contain the necessary data and I expect the reason that it had a problem in installing itself was because the virus was (unsuccessfully) trying to defend itself.
On principle, I always use the freely available recommended antivirus and antimalware software. I wonder if I would have remained protected if I had paid for this facility from one of the big providers like Norton who so often come under criticism for being "bloatware" and slowing down the computers into which they are installed to a crawl.

P.P.

[hurn]

I'm still using AVG 7.5 and its still updating itself everyday. :ok:

Going to wait until updates are pulled for it before I try anything else.

[Keygrip]

AVG freebie v. 8 working like a dream on four computers in my network.

This particular desktop running the full, full, full, version with the freebie code from AVG.

The other three are on the standard freebie.

[Tarq57]

Apparently support for AVG 7.5 has been extended until end of February.
One comment I read was "I think they really mean it, this time.":}

As to whether Norton etc might have stopped this, who knows? But if you Google the question, it appears it didn't in at least two cases seen by a quick look. Appears to need a specialist removal tool. Symantec, F-secure and others make such a tool available, which may imply that their mainstream AV's don't always deal with it.

[Bus429]

I use AVG's full internet protection service (about £15/yr); worth it.

[capewrath]

No real problem with AVG8.
Sometimes the update fails, but I put that down to busy servers because it successfull later on.

I have seen reports on other forums of AVG8 problems though, but no way of knowing where the fault lies.

[theavionicsbloke]

After experiencing 'detection failure' over the years with AVG,McAfee & Nortons I found spydoctor from pc tools to be the only reliable option. I discovered this after being strongly suspicious of viral action on a desktop. All of the above failed to detect any virus. I installed Spy Doctor. Bingo, it detected several virus's and cleaned them. Symptoms instantly rectified!

Used it for some 5 years now without a sniff of any viral symptoms and many many infections detected and cleaned.

Give it a go, I think you will be surprised at the results.....