I’ve been using Grisoft’s AVG Free Edition for a few years now. I didn’t start there. Oh no.

First was Norton antivirus. It was okay … ish. But it really wasn’t stunning me. It let things through. It ran poorly. It wasn’t long before I was trying something else.

So I tried the next major name: McAfee. It made me long for Norton it was so bad. The resources that it consumed just to do absolutely nothing were stunning. My whole computer slowed down to a crawl. That went right out the window.

So, having wasted considerable funds on just antivirus software, I decided to give the freeware world a shot. I figured how much worse could anything there be? The two major pay-fors were utter crap. So long as a free AV package could meet the same low standard, I’d be sold.

That’s when I found Grisoft. I tried out one of their earlier versions of AVG Free. It wasn’t great, but it was better than both of the others. It used less resources and caught the same tests (from some old bad infected floppies) that I threw at it. There was one game where there seemed to be some programming collision and Grisoft would bring the game to a crawl after an hour or so of play, but later updates to AVG Free even fixed that. So it worked just as well as Norton as far as I could test it, but used the least resources out of all. And it updated itself daily. Who could ask for more?

Over the years it got better and better. Version 7 was a real treat. So much so that I was starting to consider actually buying Grisoft’s AVG package.

But then I “upgraded” to version 8.

And I use the term “upgrade” very loosely.

Because so far, it’s been total crap.

To start with, they totally screwed up the user interface. I think someone was trying to make it more modern. Instead they just made it even less intuitive.

Then there’s the updates. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. Seriously. Literally every other day, somehow, the update process fails. Even right now, this very second, I’ve been trying to run it manually because the automated update failed. And I get only so far through the update process when BAM, their server fails. I know it’s not my server because I’ve tested it just to make sure. It’s not my server. It’s not my ISP. It’s not my firewall. It’s their server. It’s their product. It’s their failure. And I’m really f’ing sick of it. If they don’t sort this soon, I’m going to have to give up my years of loyalty to what was once a good product and go elsewhere.

But that’s still not all. There’s also the LinkScanner scandal. What do I mean? Well, Grisoft introduced into their AV product a new feature that pre-scans the links returned in common search engine searches. So say you search for something in Google. All of the results that Google gives you are pre-scanned by LinkScanner. This is a great feature for security. But webmasters pretty much hate it. Why? Because now all sorts of websites are getting what look like hits of real people reading their website. Only those real people aren’t real people reading their site. They’re just real people doing a web search, and those hits have nothing to do with people reading a thing. It’s all pre-scans for security. Good for web surfers. Bad for web sites. It costs websites bandwidth and very much skews their statistics to gauge their readership.

Well, supposedly Grisoft was going to neuter the LinkScanner to no longer pre-scan web searches. They weren’t even going to ask users which was better, or leave it up to them. Rumor was they were just going to disable that feature because of the noisy complaints of the very few web pages that noticed. (You can tell it was such a big scandal since so few administrators even figured it out.)

That was the rumor anyway. I’ve still to see it happen. Of course that could be because I can’t get Grisoft’s AVG Free 8 to update. But meanwhile, my web searches all still pre-scan the returned links. Which, by the way, I like. And yes, I do own InsanIT.net. I’m okay with this product. I even hope more AV suites offer something similar in the future. Anything that makes the web safer for surfers is okay by me.

But the point is, it’s a weird scandal, with a stranger lack of a resolution.

And, of course, there’s Grisoft’s AVG logo itself. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Does this logo seem in any way familiar? Well, considering that it’s just a Microsoft Windows logo spun around 180 degrees, it should look pretty darn familiar. Maybe Grisoft is intentionally trying to create a familiar feel, but I’m not sure which concerns me more, getting that close to a copyright and trademark infringement of a blatantly familiar logo, or that maybe it was just “by accident” and they’re really that uninspired over at AVG.

So what does it all add up to?

I used to be a big fan of Grisoft. At a time when Norton and McAfee were, well, less than stellar, Grisoft offered a completely free antivirus solution that was infinitely better.

But today, times have changed. And Grisoft? What things they have changed, have all changed for the worse.

They do not inspire in me the confidence to pay for their product. And their free product is just darn close to pissing me off for the last time.

These days, there are other fish in the sea. I’m thinking it’s time for me to head back to open waters and search for something new. And if you’re considering using Grisoft’s AVG, I invite you to do the same.