I was working on an older PC and decided to try avg free on it. To my surprise, AVG loaded all kinds of MSN junk on it and YES, it still had to have scheduled scans... What happened after I had installed AVG, an MSN window came up asking me to set it up, which I refused to do but it wouldn't stop popping up. Also it started MSN messenger which I had disabled earlier. So I decided to uninstall AVG and lo and behold, it wouldn't uninstall. So I went to the AVG site and used their uninstaller. As soon as it was finished uninstalling, all things went back to normal and I installed Avast free, no scheduled scans and continuos free updates daily. Now I KNOW the reason I quit using AVG years ago, that re-inforced my opinions. Some HELP in posting on Computing.net plus free progs and instructions Cheers

For what it''s worth I debugged a machine a couple of weeks ago that had all kinds of nasties and AVG. It's really the first time I have seen much get past AVG. In AVG's defense, the little spuds may have been there when AVG was installed and the folks may not have ran a scan. I Avastized it when I was finished. It's the trees moving that makes the wind blow

Just shows you how varied our experiences can be on different hardware, software, etc. A year or so ago, I tried the Avast antivirus program and had major problems with it (can't recall the details). I installed AVG Free in its place and on a few other computers since without a bit of problem. If it was easy, it wouldn't be a PC.

8.5 does seem to be a resource hawg though. It's the trees moving that makes the wind blow

I just installed Avast again after my third attempt to use AVG 8.5 It sucks. I don't know what they did to it, but it isn't the software it used to be. I'm sticking with Avast.

I have noticed one or two general and varied complaints about AVG when Googling around. I've had AVG 8.5 on my XP for some time and did not got strangled up with MSN (although I might have opted out of it, or perhaps right now they are forcing the issue). It has a scheduled scan facility but it still finds things online (including bogus AntiSpyware stuff) and also picks things up on the machine, without me having to run a scan. In fact it was a bit fiddling to test a virus file on the machine because AVG kept stopping me in my tracks. In the end I download and saved the file "eicar.com.txt" from here: http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_tes... AVG did not detect it. I then took the .txt part off the file and AVG immediately gave an alarm without any need to scan the file or click on it. It also gave an alarm if I clicked the file in its original .txt form. I'm running Avast on W98SE and Vista. It seems to beaver away in the background quite nicely. AVG may or may not be more bloated - I've not yet tried replacing it with Avast on my XP to find out. Over the years I have noticed generally that some machines seem to be a bit fussy about particular AV programs - maybe a matter of finding the one that is most suitable for ones own particular setup. some other bloke...

actually there was no mestion of MSN when I installed AVG, it kind've freaked me out when it kept trying to load Some HELP in posting on Computing.net plus free progs and instructions Cheers