SillyDog701

by **Fulvio** » Tue 08 Jul, 2008 6:01 pm

I have, always, suspected some anti-virus program, but this report floored me.
Some of the AV with most vulnerabilities are the ones which charge for their services. It is crazy!

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15

by **Edward** » Sun 13 Jul, 2008 9:37 am

I have to keep Windows installed on my PC, in the event of connection problems with Comcast. Comcast does not support Linux.

They offer McAfee's product, free, to Comcast HSI customers. It seems to be working fine though, when I boot into Windows once weekly for any updates.

AVG 8.0 has a "phone home" feature that I did not like, although there is an option that can be used when installing so that it does not install that particular feature. AVG 7.5 was better, IMHO.

Avast, I also had some issues with. Although it appears to be the most complete anti-virus solution out there that is free to use, based on what it offers, when the Windows desktop appeared, for some unknown reason, it would take Avast a good 30 minutes just to download any updates and install them. At the time, someone in their support forums thought that any remnants of Norton (Symantec) were still present on the system, Symantec has a download that will remove all remaining traces of Norton including registry keys, however after trying this and reinstalling Avast afterwards, it still took 1/2 hour to update itself. Avast had no further answers, so I gave up on it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 SeaMonkey/1.1.11

by **Fulvio** » Sun 13 Jul, 2008 1:44 pm

AVG 8.0 has a "phone home" feature

What is that? I have AVG8.0, and there has been a love/hate relationship since it came out, but, at this point, although I tried two or three other antivirus programs, I always came back to AVG. 7.5 was definitely simpler, and I had it (or its predecessors) for seven or eight years.
I had McAfee, but I don't like the once a week update (with a few exceptions). I could use McAfee, which my ISP, Cox, offers, also, for free, but I see little in it to make it more desirable than McAfee. I tried Avast for a couple of days, and the updates, I agree, were miserable.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080703 Firefox/2.0.0.15 Flock/1.2.3

by **Edward** » Sun 13 Jul, 2008 5:04 pm

Fulvio wrote:
AVG 8.0 has a "phone home" feature

What is that? I have AVG8.0, and there has been a love/hate relationship since it came out, but, at this point, although I tried two or three other antivirus programs, I always came back to AVG. 7.5 was definitely simpler, and I had it (or its predecessors) for seven or eight years.

I believe the feature is called Link Scanner.

See this for some information.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 SeaMonkey/1.1.11

by **James** » Sun 13 Jul, 2008 5:33 pm

Up until recently I had used my ISP's free offering (F-Secure Security suite) and my wife had used AVG 7. When we received our new computers from Dell two weeks back, they came pre-loaded with McAfee. I'm liking what it has to offer and so far, no problem. We've decided to increased the subscription to 24 months.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

by **Edward** » Sun 13 Jul, 2008 5:38 pm

I did not see anything about an expiration date for the McAfee software provided by Comcast, so it must be a special version that renews/updates automatically.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 SeaMonkey/1.1.11

by **James** » Sun 13 Jul, 2008 8:47 pm

It sounds very similar to what Charter was offering us, Edward; a very good deal for its customers.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

by **Robb_** » Mon 14 Jul, 2008 6:10 pm

Good Evening,

I've been running AVG 7.5 on two XP systems and Vista without a hitch.

I tried to run 8.0 on my Vista Unit and it hangs when using Google search there are little wheels that continue to run beside the search links and it screws up Vista and have to use Ctrl Alt Delete to get out of it.

I thought it was just an issue with Vista but when I installed it on an XP machine the same thing happened.

I had to go back to 7.5 on the Vista machine and I'm currently trying (Avira AntiVir Personal) on an XP machine which I found at download.com.

Do you know what is happening with the AVG 8.0 ?
And if not is the (Avira AntiVir Personal) program any good?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

by **Robb_** » Mon 14 Jul, 2008 6:21 pm

I think this made be the source of my problems with AVG 8.0

Check out the attached link!

www.dslreports.com/forum/r20502964-AVG- ... x-to-crash -

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

by **Fulvio** » Tue 15 Jul, 2008 12:10 pm

I have gone back and forth with other antivirus programs, and, always came back to AVG.
I will summarize what I found out.
1. The Safe Search which is found as an incompatible add-on, does not hurt, if AVG Shield is not installed. I made [url=
www.dslreports.com/forum/r20502964-AVG- ... x-to-crash -] a link to the website provided [/url], and there is long explanation on how to avoid problems.
I am using McAfee Site Advisor, which works well, at least in Firefox2.x, and is free, to do what AVG can't deliver. I found out that Site Advisor installs into FF3.0, but I have a short track record.
2.AVG8.0 is turning into a suite, of sorts, and some features do not work well. Reading the above thread, I see that because of some problems with the extras, some people say that AVG antivirus should be abandoned. For what?
3. Initially, I found that AVG8.0 was taking, seemingly, forever to do a scan. But, I found out that it was a simple matter of setting up AVG correctly, and it is very reasonable. If I do nothing more than scanning, my 50+ GB C drive takes between 90 and 105 minutes to scan. I have also an external drive, and scanning that will take time.
Using features of the computer, especially, like playing music, will slow down the scanning.
At times, I surf and play music, and the scan may take up to an hour longer. It is pretty obvious that these operations slow down the scanning, and not the other way around.
4. I tried other AV programs, and none of them delivered, satisfactorily. Avast took forever to update. This has been reported by others, and, I, even contacted their support.
AntiVir is ok, but it deliver a lot less. But, you can wittle down AVG, the same way.
It took me nearly one month, and I understand AVG. And, Firefox never crashed, nor my mail has been affected in any way.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15

by **Edward** » Fri 18 Jul, 2008 8:11 pm

I'm giving Avast another try. I uninstalled McAfee and installed Avast, in Safe Mode.

It took a few minutes for Avast to download updates, I posted a log to their online forum today to see if everything looks right, but I was able to edit a .INI file to add a line, which I believe will cause Avast to wait 2 minutes after Windows comes up, before it will check for updates.

I do like the way it scans e-mail as well as incoming/outgoing newsgroup messages.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 SeaMonkey/1.1.11

by **Edward** » Sun 20 Jul, 2008 10:56 am

Edward wrote:Avast, I also had some issues with. Although it appears to be the most complete anti-virus solution out there that is free to use, based on what it offers, when the Windows desktop appeared, for some unknown reason, it would take Avast a good 30 minutes just to download any updates and install them. At the time, someone in their support forums thought that any remnants of Norton (Symantec) were still present on the system, Symantec has a download that will remove all remaining traces of Norton including registry keys, however after trying this and reinstalling Avast afterwards, it still took 1/2 hour to update itself. Avast had no further answers, so I gave up on it.

I AM RETRACTING MY COMMENT ABOVE.

I decided to give Avast! another try and I am now glad that I did.

It has now not taken 30+ minutes to update, updates have downloaded and installed faster.

McAfee and AVG Free each took a good 2 hours to scan the system. Avast! took less than 45 minutes for the same scan, consisting of 8.1 Gb of files. Avast! also detected two instances of ad-ware and one trojan horse which McAfee and AVG did not detect previously.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 SeaMonkey/1.1.11

by **Fulvio** » Mon 21 Jul, 2008 10:18 am

My hard drive is nearly 50 GB, and if I do nothing, AVG8.0 will take less than two hours. I did not give Avast any second chance because of the update issue. My AVG8.0 scan takes longer than AVG7.5's did. It look at over 800,000 objects, while 7.5 never looked at 200,000.
My very first scans with AVG8 were looking at 1.3 million objects, but I realized that I was scanning also the external drive (I scan that once a week, or anything is found on my C drive).
The AVG scan is slowed down considerably(20% slower) if I play music.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 Firefox/2.0.0.16

by **Edward** » Mon 21 Jul, 2008 4:51 pm

I uninstalled some software today, that I was no longer using, one of them had a process that starts at bootup and continually ran.

Since that no longer happens, perhaps a scan might take even less time, now that more memory is free.

For Linux users, Avast! also has a Linux version of the software. I installed it on my 166 MHz Pentium system yesterday (256 Mb memory). It took the Linux version 31 minutes to fully scan my /home directory, it found no viruses.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 SeaMonkey/1.1.11

by **Edward** » Mon 21 Jul, 2008 8:12 pm

I just discovered that the Help & Support service (helpsvc.exe) was using 100% of the CPU resources. This might be the cause of a particular issue.

Microsoft issued a hotfix for this problem but it only applies to SP 2, not SP 3. I went into the System Configuration Utility and turned off Help & Support, as I never use it. Maybe this will solve the other issue.

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