Paul Doherty’s Notebook

A user updated AVG 7.5 to 8.0 yesterday, and found that it froze her PC on reboot. (After login the desktop background appeared, but no Start button or icons.)

I found the cause was a trial copy of BullGuard which had been supplied with the PC. She had never used it but had not uninstalled it, and it duly expired. AVG 7.5 seemed to be happy to live alongside it, but AVG 8.0 most definitely wasn’t (it’s never a good idea to run two anti-malware products at the same time).

Be sure to remove all other always-running anti-virus products, whether expired or not, before you install AVG 8.0.

When Firefox updated itself to 2.0.0.14 recently, I found that many of my add-ons stopped working, among them Adblock and the British English Dictionary. Message shown on Tools | Add-ons was “Incompatible with this version of Firefox”.

This turned out not to be true. Re-installing them was painless and got them all working again.

AVG 8.0 is now out.

There is a free version at http://free.grisoft.com

This is the procedure I generally follow:

1. Download Version 8 from here.

2. Uninstall the current version (typically 7.5).

3. Restart the PC.

4. Install the new version by running the downloaded file.

I choose NOT to install the “Security Toolbar” when asked.

The new version seems to be a useful improvement — it runs quicker than 7.5 on my PC and also searches for spyware (and tracking cookies) which 7.5 didn’t.

AVG adds some anti-spyware features from Ewido (AVG has bought Ewido) which 7.5 didn’t have; for that reason earlier versions of Ewido need to uninstalled before AVG 8.0 can be installed. The AVG 8.0 installation process checks for their presence and will warn you if it finds them.