A few months ago a change was made in the AVG Anti-virus line that has caused concern for us at Panther Computers and that has resulted in McAfee and Norton like slowness in PCs. I have communicated these observations and concerns to Grisoft as a Distributor, but have had to find a reason and a work around until their programmers can resolve the issue in a future release. The reason is a full system scan that can be easily resolved for now by a quick change in the options.
For all tuneups and new Panther PCs we should be setting these options for you, however we are human and some do slip through. Additionally if you have had a tuneup or have an older Panther in the house, you will need to set these options.
Locate the AVG icon in the system tray near the clock. Double click it to bring up the control center. Locate the Scheduler component and click it only once to highlight it. Click at the bottom of the Control panel on the Scheduled Tasks button. Find the scheduled task named “Test plan in basic mode” and double click it. “Schedule Daily Test” should be at the top of the open window. Uncheck both “If missed, start immediately when user logs on” and “Periodically start scheduled anti virus test” . Now click the ok button. Now click on the close button. And finally close the control center by clicking the red x in the right hand top of the control center window.
Ok, you should be good unless some future update resets it.
What should be happening is the “If missed, start immediately when user logs on” is unchecked the full daily scan will start at the time set next to the “Periodically start scheduled anti virus test” if the computer is on, but only at that time. For example if the PC was on at 3am and the test was scheduled then it would run till done. If it was off and you come in at 8am the test wouldn\’t run. Instead it will run once a day as soon as the PC is turned on since the programmers made a glitch.
By turning off the scheduled daily scan this will prevent it from running at all and prevent system resources from being diminished and making the PC slower. There is some increased risk, but nominal compared to the impact of a full scan on a PC, especially those that need more memory or are low on drive space. Ideally potential threats are identified as they enter the PC not later with a full system scan.
So why do we still recommend AVG? Frankly, even in this “wounded” state it is the best anti virus protection we\’ve seen. We have compared it to all of the major brands and many of the unknowns. We get sick systems in constantly with McAfee, Norton, Panda, Trend Micro, Zone Alarm, Bit Defender, Sophos, AOL Protections (Actually private label McAfee), Bellsouth Internet Protection (also McAfee), and many others. We\’ve tested Norman Defense products and other free for home users software like Avast, and none provide the consistent results and reliability of AVG. So being the best give you some room for forgiveness on a minor annoyance that can be worked around. If the programming continues to be sloppy or isn\’t fixed, and if a competitor can equal or best or results, then we will change. In the mean time we will continue to test the competition and use AVG.