Since AVG8 had a terrible performance on my parent’s computer, I am very glad now I moved to another AV soft as it seems AVG is suffering a major bug right now which causes your windows to stop working! Note that this problem is not affecting all versions, but guess what, Dutch is one of the affected ones!
In the meantime, I have switched to Avira Antivir, but that didn’t last long either as there came nasty popups about potential threats which scared the hell out of my mom, only because she was using the free version instead of the professional one. Also, it doesn’t have an email scanner.
So, currently, they are running Avast Home edition. It comes with a whole lot of crap (‘advanced’ antivirus shields) which you will want to disable. You might also want to disable the automatic checksumming of every file on your box, because obviously it generates a lot of I/O, especially when you don’t want it.
But it does automatically reroute pop3 and smtp connections so email traffic gets scanned automagically without any configuration (which is a relieve in comparison with AVG where you have to configure it manually if you don’t use M$ crapware like outlook). There was one catch, as it seems your free download version ‘expires’ after 30 (?) days, unless you register it. No problem, registration is free. It seems you have to reregister every year in order to be able to keep using it. Sounds fair enough to me: if you keep using the AV soft, it means you’re satisfied, so why not let them know you are using it by registering it for free.
It kinda reminds of this funny article, in which one argues Windows should become Ad-ware. 🙂 I sure woudn’t mind using an adware version, as long as I can play my games full-screen. 😉