HLDRRR Part II

We hadn’t succeeded after all in cleaning the PC of this crap. After my previous post, Erika and I spent a long evening attacking this thing without any victory at all. I was all for copying her important data to an external drive, hitting it with AV/Spyware, copying it the new laptop, and wiping the old one.

But while I was working in Dublin, Erika came across the key – it had used Deamon tools and installed a virtual CD of itself! Now that’s mean! She discovered this via karspesky online when it reported a virtual CD-Drive that she didn’t know about, and couldn’t see.

So she uninstalled Deamon tools, and went back over the process previously outlined, and that, apparently, was that. No more virus.

Way to go Erika.

Tagged with hldrrr, hidr, srosa, wintemps, kaspersky

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AVG 8 Free – Part III

Continuing the story of my struggles with AVG 8, well I’ve uninstalled it and currently am without anti-virus, but only until I have time to find something decent to replace it.

Oh to recount the problems I had! To start with, I had a bugger of a time getting rid of Link Checker. Disabling it, as reported elsewhere, leaves a really annoying icon in the system tray. I followed the advice to re-install AVG 8 without linkchecker, but had real problems uninstalling it as it wasn’t even able to kill it’s OWN PROCESSES! What a rubbish installer!
OK, so I uninstalled completely, and re-installed without link-checker. The only advantage was the icon didn’t show a problem all the time – otherwise, the thing was equally heavy on system resources as before.

What I noticed immediately was that every time I got an email, Windows locked up for a short but noticable period, which was really annoying. Then, as previously reported, I found that the 3 processes were sucking up over massive amounts of memory, over 100MB. Now I use Lightroom and Photoshop a fair bit and I really don’t want anything else taking up memory unless it has to, because working with photos takes up enough memory as it is!

So goodbye AVG 8, and good riddance. A real pity, ‘cos I’ve been using it for years. They seem to be going down the Norton Anti-Virus route, as someone else has said.

AVG 8 Free – Part II

OK, so finally managed to download AVG 8. Installed as standard and got the horrible link-checker thingy, which proved impossible to de-activate without a warning in the task tray.
Tried to re-install using Grisofts instructions, which failed (really horrible installer btw).
So uninstalled the whole thing, and re-installed without LinkChecker thingy. So far, so good…

AVG Free Anti-Virus turning into Adware

I’ve been using AVG Anti-Virus (free) for just about forever. I’m really not a believer in subscription anti-virus, as;

a) I hardly ever have problems with viruses, and
b) anti-virus is like oil – there’s no reason to come up with something better ‘cos everyone interested will lose money on all those cancelled subscriptions.

But lately AVG have been pushing a pop-up onto my screen as part of the daily update process – every day! It’s just a stupid pop-up with the usual marketing blurb, but from the way it grabs focus to the several seconds it takes me away from my day-job, I find it really annoying. Really, really annoying. It amounts to abusing their client base.

Now I appreciate that the software is free for me, but not free for them. ANnd I’m all for taking part in the odd survey, if they wanted to find out why I don’t buy AV. Or what kind of AV I would buy. Or what kind of user I am. Like Zonealarm, in fact, after every update of that freeware.

But a stupid annoying pop-up every day, that gets changed to make it more intrusive and harder to close, isn’t my idea of good marketing. This is the kind of rubbish I avoid by using Firefox with AdBlock, FlashBlock and NoScript add-ons. And I find it really annoying to have to suffer without a no-thanks-I’m-never-going-to-upgrade opt-out.

Really, really annoying. In fact, just yesterday, asked to recommend an anti-virus product, for the first time in ages I DIDN’T recommend AVG. The person is using Avast, which I personally hate for the stupid distracting revolving task-tray icon, but I said “Oh, keep that, AVG is just too annoying now”. So that’s one potential future paying customer lost for AVG.

If it was easy to find and download the new free version, I would still be recommending AVG, but 3 attempts to download the installer have failed. One more attempt and I’m moving to Avast myself! Of course, if it really does suck up 70MB of system memory, or hoses my network connection, it’ll be going off quicker than it got on – which itself could be a problem! Hopefully installing without some of the garbage will make a difference, otherwise I’ll just have to check out some of the competition – if there is any!

If anyone is interested, the Free PC Security blog has installation instructions.