AVG Anti Virus: Warning

[Wishmaster]

Obviously this is nothing to do with Carcassonne but as all of you here can only read this site if your PC is working I thought this would be usefu...

There's a good chance that many of you use AVG anti virus software and may use Firefox as your browser. That was me too until last week. You may have received nag screens to update from version 7.5 of AVG to the new 8.0 - I would suggest you don't!! Unfortunately I did. On it's first update it decided it would be a good idea to delete ALL my bookmarks - 6 years worth of bookmarks!! I was not ahppy. Having now checked around several forums it appears that this is a common occurance, sometimes on the first update, sometimes later, with no way of retrieving them. I don't know the impact on IE. It also slowed my PC down a lot and added lots of stuff that was not needed.

I have now uninstalled AVG and said goodbye to it. There are two free alternatives that seem to be getting equally as good reviews. I'm using Avira (http://www.free-av.com/) and so far very good. The other is Avast (http://www.avast.com/).

Also, the new version 3 of Firefox has now been released... And is it fast!! Very much improved. Just needs Google to get their toolbar working with it and it'll be perfect.

That's it - You've now been warned so don't come crying to me for all your lost Carcassonne links... cos I've not half of them anymore!! 

[Barak]

I did exactly the same thing, what with having firefox and installing new avg, but nothing bad has happened. All my bookmarks are fine and although i did have some problems initially with the browser getting a bit angry, it works fine now. I wonder why yours went haywire?

[djwurm]

i use the new firefox with Avira and it works great.. never used AVG before..

[canada steve]

I dumped AVG when they wanted me to upgrade and have been using Avast with no problems.

[Joff]

I use IE with AVG 8.0 and everything is fine.

[Scott]

I had some trouble today following last night's Windows security update. Hopefully everyone else was spared that grief.

Freeware antivirus stacks up pretty good against consumer-level antivirus, but the best is corporate or enterprise-level antivirus. Symantec Endpoint for the win.

[Tobias]

I do not use anti-virus software :P

[Gantry]

Whoa, that's a bad scene Wishmaster 

I haven't downloaded FF yet, usually wait until the bugs get ironed out in any new release.  Hopefully you have a backup? 

Tobias: you're not alone, a surprising number of people don't bother with AV software any more.  As long as you practice safe hex, you should be fine, but hopefully you should be using a firewall as well as keeping your system up to date.

[Scott]

I respectfully disagree. Most people who run without antivirus are infected with something. They are completely unaware because they have no antivirus software to inform them. Not all malware makes their presence known by making your life miserable.

[djwurm]

I agree.. I bought a new laptop a fwe weeks ago and installed all kinds of programs on it and ran a few days without a anti virus software. Well come to find out I had all kinds of adware and malware all over my system in just a few days.

[Tobias]

Whoa, that's a bad scene Wishmaster 

I haven't downloaded FF yet, usually wait until the bugs get ironed out in any new release.  Hopefully you have a backup? 

Tobias: you're not alone, a surprising number of people don't bother with AV software any more.  As long as you practice safe hex, you should be fine, but hopefully you should be using a firewall as well as keeping your system up to date.

Yes, I do have a firewall

[Gantry]

I respectfully disagree. Most people who run without antivirus are infected with something. They are completely unaware because they have no antivirus software to inform them. Not all malware makes their presence known by making your life miserable.

The only way to get infected with a virus is to run something that contains a virus. Thus when I said "..as long as you practice safe hex...", that means not running anything that might contain a virus, so I still stand by what I said when applied to conscientious users. I do a lot of installs and run machines for days or weeks without AV, and as long as the user is only using the machine with the business apps supplied, they have nothing to worry about.  I haven't seen a virus infection yet on a later-protected machine.

In general, I agree with you most people can't resist an interesting download or "hey check this out!" email, hence the typical user will get infected pretty fast. But nowadays it's exposure to unpatched systems that don't use a firewall that is the highest risk.

[Wishmaster]

er.... no... If you are on the internet, you are open to virus's and all that stuff. So running a browser can be good enough to get you a virus.

To anyone who's not running any AV software - Never email me!

Regards the comments about AVG being fine with IE - I can not comment as I only run Firefox, but I've read a lot of forums in the last couple of weeks and AVG are losing takers hand over fist.

Avira seems good on my XP machine. Thought I might give Avast a run out on my Vista laptop, which did have Norton but I've removed it as the thing was running at the speed of a sloth with it on (I've not connected to the net since it came off!!).

[Joff]

Just to clarify. I use IE7, running AVG 8 on a Vista machine. I am having no problems and everything seems to work fine, but of course, like many, preferred AVG 7.

[Tobias]

er.... no... If you are on the internet, you are open to virus's and all that stuff. So running a browser can be good enough to get you a virus.

Not really no. But I promise not to e-mail you