Here is a little tale of from the horrendous world of antivirus programs.
I have been testing out various free antivirus solutions and I really thought I found a nice working solution. AVG antivirus free edition.
But I was wrong. I had been using the full free suite from AVG for more than 3 months. Pretty happy, had a few issues with weird temp files not being detected and so but overall happy. Then yesterday I got a virus warning from a file downloaded of the internet. I decided to do a full scan of my hard drive and AVG detected a number of instances of the virus.
AVG procedded to remove the virus which was followed by a pop in window that asked me to restart my computer for the cleanup process to finalise. I clicked yes to reboot, but my computer never did.
Instead it was caught in a perpetual boot loop. It reaches the BIOS boot screen and then resets the power. I can enter the F8 boot menu, but no matter what option I select it results in an instant reboot.
The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite and it has no working internal DVD/CD drive. It has no Floppy drive and no boot from USB in BIOS options.
Customer service (or lack of same)
I wrote a nice email to AVG customer service to describe my issue, but the only reply I got was a standard email to say that free edition had no technical support. I was welcome to buy the full edition and they even provided me with a direct link to do so. Ya right, I am supposed to pay money for a program that just did more harm to my PC than any virus was able to for more than 2 years.
The result – AVG antivirus killed my PC
Since I have no option of doing a complete rescue from a boot CD, noor do I know that this would even help, my laptop is effectively killed by AVG. My last resort to rescue the laptop is to deliver it into service. For them to just open the PC its 50$ and I was told to expect no less than a 150$ bill IF they where able to fix the laptop at all.
Conclusion
Do not choose the AVG free suite if you are looking for a working antivirus program. In fact dont install their software at all if you are looking to preserve your computer in a working state. I am out 120$ by choosing their free solution, in retrospect it would probably have been wiser to fork out 40$-60$ for a paid antivirus solution. But nobody expects the antivirus program to be more malicious than the viruses themselves?
