Almost from the time I got a computer and got wise to the fact that Norton and McAfee were bundled bloatware, I have used AVG as my antivirus. I have installed it on other people’s machines, I have advocated for it and vouched for it with other people, and I trusted it without reservation. No longer.
With their last update, AVG very quietly and without my explicit permission installed a browser hijacker. Whenever I opened a new tab I got a Google-looking interface titled AVG Secure Search instead of the 9-box matrix that I set up with my frequently visited websites (I’m running Windows 8). In the upper-right corner there was a hyperlink that opened a prompt allegedly allowing me to turn it off. It didn’t work. It kept coming back.
AVG’s solution to getting rid of it didn’t work. It was on the Add/Remove Programs list, but it would not remove itself. Revo Installer didn’t work. Uninstalling AVG completely didn’t work. I even went so far as to run a System Restore, using a disk image from 2 weeks ago to make sure I got rid of it. That didn’t work. After an hour I was informed that the restore failed because of, yep, that program.
Finally, after going through everything again, finding everything AVG-labeled on my computer that I could find, it was still there. How can that be? So, in a fit of frustration, I deleted Firefox and went for a clean install. Little did I know that doing that would require me to download it on Robin’s computer and use a thumb drive to install. Internet Explorer resisted every single attempt to install Firefox, fueling my ire. What else could go wrong in my quest to get rid of a simple program I didn’t want?
Everything is now back to normal. At least, I assume so. Firefox is back up, no more new tab hijacks, AVG is as history as I can make it, and now I’m running Bitdefender, which was highly rated in the reviews I found. We’ll see how that works.
It seems like much ado about nothing, doesn’t it? I could have just learned to live with it. It might even have been beneficial. But dammit, IT IS MY MACHINE. Nobody puts anything on this machine but me. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t need it, I didn’t want it, and making me work that hard to get rid of it guaranteed that I was going to get rid of the whole smash. You’d think by now that software developers might have learned that lesson. Clearly not. Judging by the traffic about it all over the Web I am not the only one who thinks this way. They must have lost a ton of customers over this one issue.
So goodbye, AVG. You used to be a dependable ally. Now you’re a malware company reduced to hijacking other people’s property. It’s a shame, really. It takes a lifetime to create loyalty and a single act to wreck it forever. Stop being what you claim to be protecting people from.