As with any major upgrade of a program, there are usually several customizations and settings you have to review to get the program to behave the way you are accustomed to. AVG Free version 8 is no different. The new version boast a new interface as well as new features which included the controversial (rightfully so) link scanner component and the infamous general “annoyances” / “bloat”.
Of course, with a few tweaks you can trim down AVG. This post in the TweakGuides forum does a great job of pointing out the changes you can make. After reviewing the changes myself, I cannot say I disagree with any of them and would second everything the poster recommends.
As with any new version, you cannot expect it to be exactly the same as the previous one, but you can [try to] make it behave the way you prefer.
Jason Faulkner is the man who brings you our daily tips. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Thanks for the tip. After carefully reading the topic, I think it is important to note that the author of the tweak is a gamer and only wants an AV for on demand scans. I personally find turning off the real time scanner and context menu scanning extreme and not a good idea for the average compute user’s (read non-gamer)security needs.
In my opinion, using a custom install to turn off the Link Scanner and Email scanner is good enough. It will improve performance greatly. After testing AVG 8 on a couple of computers, I’m satisfied with that configuration and resulting performance except for the update scheduler–it seems to have a mind of its own.
>> I personally find turning off the real time scanner and context menu scanning extreme and not a good idea for the average compute user’s (read non-gamer)security needs.
Great point. I do actually have these disabled on my system since I don’t really download anything. I just need to have some AV program installed for when I sometimes connect to customer’s systems using my home PC (per their policies).
AVG without Resident Shield is useless. I turned off but my computer was infected with bunch of Trojans. So my advice: if you don’t like Resident Shield, try some another AV.