SOFTWARE: AVG 8

Using a hammer to swat a fly makes for a very inefficient, but occasionally satisfying, flyswatter. I wish people who made hammers wouldn't mention its occasional effectiveness as a flyswatter.

The software analogy comes from the security sector. I WISH Grisoft had been satisfied to maintain AVG as an effective Anti-Virus, just as I wanted ZoneAlarm's firewall to remain pure and AdAware strictly a detector, after the fact, of scumware. Instead of staying in their niche and perfecting it, the folks behind these products have decided to branch out.

In the latter two cases, it's meant removing them from my recommended list. ZoneAlarm still sort of floats there, but that's from a lack of alternatives, rather than a true endorsement of the product.

Which brings me to the latest iteration of AVG. Still recommended. But I wish Grisoft had decided not to interfere with my web-browsing and stuck to detecting when evil files try to make my life difficult. Instead, it's AVG that had to be tamed down a bit.

I warned a few months ago that version 8 of AVG was going to replace 7.5. There was a brief bout of fear that there wouldn't be a free version of 8, but that's not proven to be the case. And certainly the scare tactics used to warn of the impending change were confusing. But here I am, now running 8.01 with success. Maybe not happiness, but success.

First, there are some changes to AVG. It might have been ugly, but it was easy to use. Now it's beautiful and a bit of a bear to use. Me, I like easy to use. The new interface does feature one big ugly wart. The red Notification ad at the bottom trying to encourage you to upgrade. It's a small cost to avoid cost.

Other than that, there's an easy UpdateNow button, but you have to double-click on any of the components to get a look at it, rather than the old single-click. You can also use an enhanced Tools menu option to go through a full set of enhanced settings. basically, I turned most stuff on, preferring to be alerted to changes and let me decide what to do with them.

With one exception. Link Scanner.

I have the NoScript add-in for Firefox and it prevents drive-by applet running by sites I don't want to let things run on my computer. It provides the bulk of of what Link Scanner does and does it better. I get choices AND I know who and what are trying to access my computer. Link Scanner doesn't do that. And running it AND NoScript were causing me great delays loading pages as the two fought over what to deny running on various pages. I also didn't need Link Scanner checking the URLs on pages and letting me know which were okay and which were potentially naughty. Users of Internet Explorer (they still exist?) and Firefox users who are not running NoScript are the apparent target audience for Link Scanner.

So, I turned off Link Scanner. And things got back to normal. Ahhhh, well, close to normal. AVG responded petulantly. Instead of the gaily coloured squares in the icon representing AVG in the system tray, the icon reverted to the old grey-scale icon, this time with a red-circled exclamation mark over top. And, in fact, running the actual application warned me I "may not be protected! Some components report an error." Yeah, I know, I disabled Link Scanner.

There are times when AVG doesn't automatically update itself. In the old days, the appearance of the grey icon denoted that. Now, by turning off Link Scanner, I've lost the valuable tell-tale. Now, I will have to add running AVG manually on system upkeep Fridays and checking the status of the various non-Link Scanner components. It's a bother, but not much of one.

I thought of a solution for Grisoft. Let them use an icon with one or even two grey squares to indicate one or more components are disabled. Then, if it's not uptodate, resort to the full grey-scale icon as in the past. It's THAT situation that needs alerting to, not the user-decided disabling of a single component.

I think Link Scanner belongs in the full-blown AVG Internet Security product, NOT in the anti-virus product. It's cross-pollination into a product it doesn't belong to doesn't produce a stronger product. I think it demonstrably weakens it.

AVG now also plays into the scumware zone as it has an Anti-Spyware component too. I'll live with that for awhile. Doesn't affect web-browsing at this point. Seems innocuous enough. But that's because I'm not running any current ASW application such as CounterSpy or even AdAware 2007. If you ARE running something that isn't an after-the-fact scanner (like Spybot), then you have to decide which one to leave active. Having two programs trying to do the same thing at the same time is the recipe for computer failure. If you have the SLIGHTEST doubt that there might be a clash, turn off AVG's Anti-Spyware component.

Okay, what's the verdict? I'm running AVG 8 on my main computer.