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.