Be warned this post contains strong langauge if that bothers you then don’t read my blog cause it ain’t the first time and sure won’t be the last time. 
Okay. You’re warned.
I have used AVG Free for several years, for it’s simpicity, stability, and reliability.
recently, they announced they WILL NO LONGER SUPPORT 7.5 and all users need to update or go without any new protection.
Which in itself is utter BS, but whatever.
So I updated.
Well, AVG can kiss me goodbye. On my ass.
The “new” AVG 8.0 is a resource hog of epidemic proportion, and aside from that, it comes with a number of extremely annoying “notifications” that sit in the form of a constant Red Exclamation Point in your task bar.
First, I hate, HATE, complexity put into something which should require utter simplicty. Prior to 8.0, AVG was a tiny, non-intrusive program that did its job (keeping viruses out of my email and off my hard drive) and did it damn well, with no annoying “features” or game-stopping update boxes, etc. I turned on my comp, program updated within a few seconds, and I was up and running. No hassle. Never had to think twice about it. THAT’s how it SHOULD Be!
BUT NOW?
Now, I find it adds 4 – Yes, FOUR – brand new processes to my system boot and together THEY TAKE OVER 70 MEGS OF SYSTEM MEMORY — this is absurd and disgusting. Totally unneccesary Bloat. It doesn’t matter what I am doing or not doing — sitting idle it utilizes 50, bare minimum. And opening programs? Email, browser (I use Thunderbird and Firefox) and every other program now takes about 1/3 longer to open. If I monitor the AVG programs I can see their resource use DOUBLE. That is just … it’s just … incomprehenisble. You tell me that between 7.5 and 8 they made SO MANY vast and wonderful additions (i.e. annoying and useless fluff like little green checkmarks on google links) that it now needs to use upwards of 70 farking megs of memory just to filter viruses?
Retro stupid.
To top it off, unless you very carefully check your settings, you have to put up with the hassle of constant fucking notification boxes popping up every goddam five minutes demanding that you reboot your computer, update your viruses, your email scanner has been updated, blah blah blah. And if you don;t? A little red mark sits in your task bar FOREVER — until you update. Even if you DO check your rpeferences (listed as “Advanced Settings” in the damn menu drop down and nowhere else) you have absolutely NO way to hide the taskbar notification — short of disabling the whole thing through cmd.exe – which would obviously be bad.
And don’t get me started on the uselessness of “Link Scanner” and “Active Surf Shield” … fuck, what, I freakin use a virus program so I don’t NEED TO WORRY IF I AM CLICKING ON SOMETHING BAD THAT IS WHAT IT IS FOR. Why would I want assinine green checkmarks on every freakin google link that take forever to “OK” on a page? STU___PID!
Okay. I will calm down now.
Don’t support AVG 8.0 – or if you must, freakin mail them your dissatisfaction.
End rant.
There is actually a way to install AVG without LinkScanner from the beginning.
Run it through command line like this:
c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
I too noticed the dramatic increase in usage of system reasources when I installed 8.0. One has to wonder if the pro version could take be less of a memory hog.
But Adam, the Free version should be a good advert for the Pro, if it is rubbish then who in their right mind is going to give them any money? If anything, the Free version should have half the features of the Pro one, and provide just the very basics of hard drive scanning and email, that’s all that most people want anyway.
I’m with you. If you have a quad core machine with 4 gigs ram, it’s not too bad, but for everyone else it is way too intrusive, all of us with a singe processor it is way too intrusive.
Why does every program think that they will be the only thing running on your machine so they bog you down with services which slow the crap out of your machine.
Have yet to read the comments on your blog…have read your writings…could not agree more…and the worst part is the arseholes at Grissoft don’t address the problems, reply to mails etc..fuckem…they can bring back 7.5 for free and I won’t touch it (tell my clients the same)…it was SUCH a cool free program and now it behaves like a virus…screw them.P.S. RunninG Duo 2.0 Intel+MB+2 GIGS mem…it(AVG) helped to trash the sys twice…happened to manY (actually, Googling the issue brought me to your blog-and showed me PLENTY users with AVG related probs)Which AV to try now?? Any ideas??
p.s….. when i say trashed, i mean as in newly loaded system(XP)
I completely agree with everyone else here! I AM using the paid version, & I recently upgraded from 7.5 to 8.x because I thought I was getting some neato new firewall settings. What a piece of freakin’ SHIT !!!!! This G’D piece of CRAP has done nothing but cost me both TIME and MONEY over the past few days. I am constantly having to RESET adapter and other settings. They just go away for seemingly no reason! And it check my damn email every freaking FIVE minutes!
Give me a break !!!!!!
After some initial time needed to settle the quality of the new product i’m now completely satisfied with a 8.0 free version.
First thing i noticed when i installed it is that they added a heuristic checker to free version. “Cool”? Oh no, not for a resident scanner. Really hoggy, extremely slows down starting programs! This is valid not only for AVG, but for any AV i have experience with – like previously Kaspersky. Advanced settings -> Resident protection -> Heuristic protection disable. From then on it just seems even lighter on system resources than 7.x, or at least exactly the same.
Also i don’t have any firewall or email checking component installed, and i believe the link checker has been taken out too. Clicking on bad files in e-mail triggers protection nontheless, just as trying to open them with any other program.
I’m running it on a 512MB machine from 2004, and the multiple processes you mention consume 20MB altogether if added together, in a real total probably less than 13MB. Consider that windows memory management is a very sophisticated thing. Programs would memory-map their read-only data, making Windows load and unload it on demand, but the loaded data is counted into every processes’ memory consumption that has memory mapped a specific file. From what i have seen without heuristic search the real pattern in which data is touched, which is deciding for Windows’ behaviour in low-memory conditions, isn’t excessively aggressive making AGV8 still IMO the best candidate for use on low-end PCs, with only and inferior alternatives being Avira and Avast.
Also, a directory exception list has been added. Nice, now i can exlude AVG from slowing down e.g. games altogether.