Well, it's been a frustrating few days in my world as it pertains to Anti-Virus programs. After discovering some of Avira's less happier 'features' (and I didn't even tell you of the big popup that shows up regularly, taking up most of the screen, in an attempt to let you know there is a pro version), I wanted to move on to AVG (been there, got the bloated feeling), or do something that would let me go back to Avast! as my anti-virus of choice.
In the end, I'm sticking with Avira. I feel it's been giving me some false positives, but I upgraded to newer versions of just about everything it complained about and it stopped complaining. I ditched the restore points where it kept finding crap, eliminating that issue. I kept a floppy in the A: drive, cutting out the incessant grinding sound you hear when an empty floppy drive is accessed. Although I now have to remember to pop the disk before rebooting (it has DOS 6.2 on it!!!!). The big Pro reminders go away with a keyclick. I still grate on no newsgroups, but Googling often gets me closer to guessing answers, when necessary.
I can live with Avira.
Not that I wanted to initially. It's just that roadblocks kept getting in the way. AVG is, indeed, a full-fledged security system these days. It doesn't play well with others and I'm reluctant to change everything ELSE just to satisfy AVG's desire to handle all things security. It might be different in Windows 7, but here with XP, AVG is a no go.
Speaking of Win 7, I also--briefly--considered taking the time to upgrade Popeye to Microsoft's latest. Best guess? It would be a 2-3 week job. I also considered moving up the purchase of Quincy, which would, indeed have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit as the operating system. But I would have had to make concessions on the amount of memory and would have to abandon the plan to have a built-in Solid State Drive for the boot partition. And I'm STILL lallygagging to see if I can get USB 3.0 on the motherboard. And the price for the quad-core and even six-core options just keep dropping.
Instead, I slapped the money down for another external drive box with 5 terabytes of storage. Which will actually move me past the 10 Terabyte total for my full home network. Granted, I have backups of backups of backups. So there is only going to be about 2.5-3 Terabytes of actual original data on the system. But I'm old enough to remember when a 5 MEGAbyte drive for my Apple was a mere 800 bucks. There was joy when the cost per Megabyte dropped to a buck per. And sheer rapture when Gigabyte pricing reached that point. My cost for my 5 TB's of storage? Each Gigabyte is about a hundredth of a cent. And that's with tax included.
While all of THAT was going down, I DID make an attempt to move my last email account, my MAIN one, from Eudora on my desktop to GMail. Ahhhh, didn't work, and no reasons why, STILL as of yet, from Google.
So that put the kibosh on going back to Avast! I was just not prepared to let my email in and out of Popeye without SOMETHING peering over my shoulder.
I took a look at some other free and some paid AV solutions. Tested them out on virtual machines and realized I hate change period. All of them had their quirks, just as Avira didn't work exactly like Avast! So, I decided to stick with Avira since I seemed to have worked out most of the kinks in our new relationship.
The odd thing is, I still use Avast! on Ollie and Nuklon. And, when Quincy DOES come to join my little network of computers, I already have decided I will give Microsoft's built-in AV a chance. When, inevitably, I fall out of love with it too (as I frequently do with things MS), the question remains unanswered.
Avira or Avast!?
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