I order the 7.5 anti-virus update from these bastards, and they give me a “ship to” address, leading me naively to believe that they are going to ship me a CD I can slip into my computer and all will be well.
Then I get an e-mail with a link from which I am apparently supposed to download the update. OK. I’ll try. Doesn’t work. Not even close.
I’ll call the nice tech support people and they will walk me through it. Oops, there is *no phone number or e-dress for any kind of fucking tech support on any of their links or sites. *
So I “replied” to their e-mail telling them that unless they get back to me and walk me through the installation, I will kill not just kittens, but only the cute fluffy kittens. Not the butt-faced or baldy ones.
Just the cute ones.
Fuck. Getting the damned virus and buying a new computer would be less tsouris than trying to install a fucking update.
Eve, it’s not clear whether you want to download and install the free version of AVG, or if you are trying to pay for the full bells and whistles version with anti-spyware, firewall, etc.
I suspect the latter, but if it’s the former, you can get it on this page. It’s the file named avg75free_432a904.exe in the burnt orange table.
I had some trouble updating, as a apparently a number of other people did, but if you uninstall the previous version, the new install should work just fine. Their help forum was rather abrupt with posters who didn’t provide all their system and error info, but they responded very promptly to my questions.
Huh. I thought this thread would be about the fact that AVG updates every single day at 9 AM by default, and goes DING when it does so.
I’m not usually up that early, and my computer is in the same room I sleep in, so it wakes me up every damned morning.
Yeah, I know I could change the settings with even less effort than it took to write this post, but I’m fucking lazy in an inexplicable way, so slag off, you naysaying wankers!
I had the daily AVG updates, which run out soon, and so I clicked the warning thingie and bought a $63 package of all kinds of protection and updates and bells and whistles. Since they asked for a shipping address, I assumed they’d be sending me a disc, but they e’d me a link from which, I take it, I am supposed to download the update (what was the shipping address for, then?).
Having already spent my $63, I’d like to download it, but being about as adept at these things as Billie Burke, I cannot for the life of me make heads or tails of it.
I cannot also reach any tech support! I clicked and linked and contact us!'d and it was the myth of Sisyphus all over again, but with e-mail links instsead of rocks.
So now I am going to pop some lorazepam and wash it down with codiene and go to bed, and maybe the Computer Fairies will come in overnight and get it all set up for me.
You might yet get that CD, Eve. When I changed from Norton to BitDefender and Spy Sweeper I had a choice of download only or download plus CD (for a small extra charge). I took the plus CD, just in case, and it arrived a few days after I’d successfully downloaded and installed the new software.
I think the mistake was clicking the “warning thingie”. Quite a few people have been taken in by that window, and thought they had to buy AVG as an upgrade to 7.5. AVG 7.5.432 is still a free version.
The who in the what now? The only reason I haven’t gotten around to giving them any money was because it’s never been convenient to do so, and the deadline hadn’t passed yet. Now you’re saying that it’s sort of like a scam, and I don’t really need to purchase anything and the free updates will still work?!? I’ll have to read that pop-up annoy box more carefully. Thanks for the heads up.
They are telling the truth when they say that the older version of AVG is no longer going to be supported, and that you should upgrade. They just word it in such a way as to push you towards the paid version of the upgrade, rather than making it obvious where you can get the free version.
I can accept that level of salesmanship and marketing strategy from a company that has provided me with a very good free product for quite a long time.
Yup, it’s designed to fear people who aren’t real tech savvy into forking over money. There is a free version of 7.5, and it’s linked to earlier in this thread.
That’s how I feel too. I used the free version for a year – all those free automatic (almost daily) updates. So I finally caved and bought the basic package.
The download was painless, but it didn’t automatically install, or give me any prompts to install. I had to remember to go to Programs and tell it to get going, and plug in the license number, etc.
I had a virus once. This one. And over a decade later, on an ancient legacy machine I was playing with, [this one, also.
Despite rumors to the contrary you may have heard, Macs do have viruses. Tens of them! (Even if 100% of them are incapable of infecting a modern Intel Mac, there are still PowerPC Macs that can and do run Classic, which can execute a good 4-7% of those viruses, and not all of them are rendered incapable of doing damage even if the world has moved on since their authors loosed them upon us. Furthermore, the world is far from rid of Macs that run MacOS 9, or 8.x, and they are even more vulnerable. (Of course, our viruses only propagate via floppies and CDROMs and Zip disks and whatnot, and we don’t have floppy drives anymore, but someone could burn a CD or DVD of some old files and WHAMMO!).
So don’t let anyone tell you you should be using a Mac. We get them too. Every decade or so you still run into one of our ~ 60 bugs, and sometimes they can execute and spread and do damage. (Well, on an Intel Mac, only if you run an emulation environment such as SheepShaver to pretend to be an older PPC Mac running OS 8.6, or Basilisk II to pretend to be a Quadra running System 7, etc).
So when you hear folks say “Why don’t you get a Mac? You wouldn’t have to worry about viruses any more!”, take such advice with the appropriate amount of salt.
(Besides, Macs can run Windows natively now, and if you run Windows on a Mac you can get just as infected as any other Windows computer, so just because it’s a Mac doesn’t mean you can’t get viruses)
Geesh. Let’s try that again. (Moderator! Aisle 9! Damage control?)
I had a virus once. This one. And over a decade later, on an ancient legacy machine I was playing with, this one, also.
Despite rumors to the contrary you may have heard, Macs do have viruses. Tens of them! (Even if 100% of them are incapable of infecting a modern Intel Mac, there are still PowerPC Macs that can and do run Classic, which can execute a good 4-7% of those viruses, and not all of them are rendered incapable of doing damage even if the world has moved on since their authors loosed them upon us. Furthermore, the world is far from rid of Macs that run MacOS 9, or 8.x, and they are even more vulnerable. (Of course, our viruses only propagate via floppies and CDROMs and Zip disks and whatnot, and we don’t have floppy drives anymore, but someone could burn a CD or DVD of some old files and WHAMMO!).
So don’t let anyone tell you you should be using a Mac. We get them too. Every decade or so you still run into one of our ~ 60 bugs, and sometimes they can execute and spread and do damage. (Well, on an Intel Mac, only if you run an emulation environment such as SheepShaver to pretend to be an older PPC Mac running OS 8.6, or Basilisk II to pretend to be a Quadra running System 7, etc).
And any day now someone could write a new virus. Just because we haven’t had any “loose in the wild” since 1998 (Autostart Worm) doesn’t mean a new Mac virus couldn’t hit us hard tomorrow.
So when you hear folks say “Why don’t you get a Mac? You wouldn’t have to worry about viruses any more!”, take such advice with the appropriate amount of salt.
(Besides, Macs can run Windows natively now, and if you run Windows on a Mac you can get just as infected as any other Windows computer, so just because it’s a Mac doesn’t mean you can’t get viruses)
