Burchwords

I’ve been saying this for a while, if a antivirus company starts to become successful its only a matter of time before it’s effectiveness is depleted or functionality is lost.

In the last week, I’ve either had to use different antivirus programs due to fact that certain aspects of the new AVG 8.0 will not work.

First Computer:
AVG 8.0 will not work if you have an out dated version of Roxio on your computer. I’ve tried to uninstall Roxio and clean up the registry, but the AVG installer reports that Roxio is still installed on the computer. Since I knew Roxio was gone, I installed AVG. After I rebooted the update service that keeps AVG running would not work, and you did not have the ability to do a full system scan. I had to take it off and I put Bitdefender on the system.

Second Computer:

After removing Roxio from another computer and AVG actually acknowledged that it was uninstalled, so I went ahead with the installation. Everything went great till i rebooted and went to do the updates. Now, pay attention to this: AVG installs some type of network service that hosed up the internet connection and there was not way for me to get around it. I justed uninstalled AVG again and put AntiVir on the system.

It’s like I said as soon as a software company starts with the glossy button and the fancy user interface all hope is lost. AVG use to be as simple as install and walk away, but now I fear that Grisoft has fallen in the path that Norton and McAfee chose to take.

If you are in the IT field, like me, you know how anti virus companies become less effective the more they become popular. In my younger days I used Norton Anti virus software. After getting a couple of viruses I checked into a free software that came with a motherboard I had purchased. PC-cillen by Trend Micro. It seemed to be more responsive and did NOT hog my system resources. I love PC-Cillen until they came out with the 2006 version. Then I noticed a long time to load the software on startup. Trend Miro had come to meet or beat Norton on being a system resource hog.

I believe the life cycle is this;

New AV Company –> Great Product –> Catches 99% of the Viruses –>New AV Company Becomes Popular –> Adds More Features to Product — Slows Down Just a Little —>AV Company is no longer “New” and people trust the brand name —-| Product is now flashy with new colors and bench mark time is completely too slow because they put every known protection feature they can think of… —> End of Life for the software usefulness.

AV companies such as Norton can still sell products because of young and old automatically recognize their name for security. I reality I have to remove their software from computers weekly because they fail to actually catch viruses.

How many times have I took Norton off the computer, install avg and before I can even get my updates AVG Free edition is catching everything known to man.

Trend Mirco is becoming the same way. There product was really good in the being, then when they became popular its like they forgot how to program or something? Maybe everybody got drunk and went home and left the design team to do everything. Anyhoo, I hate to see Trend Micro go as Norton has.

Just yesterday I removed Norton 360 from a friend of mine computer. With Norton it took over 30 seconds for him to login with his finance software. Now after removing Norton the login time is a fast 3 seconds.

Does anybody really truly believe in Norton anymore?