Is AVG Really A Good Choice Anymore?

I have long been a fan of Grisoft’s AVG antivirus solution for Windows, but lately, I have stopped using it on my personal machines, instead using Avira Antivir.

Both of these are free, and for some, Avira might not be a great solution, as there is no e-mail component. If you open lots of untrusted e-mail, perhaps sticking with AVG, or finding another solution would be best.

This has become a question because the AVG product (commercial, as well as free versions) has begun identifying iTunes as an infected product. Now, I really don’t care about what AVG identifies iTunes as, because i don’t use it, but many of you do. It is somewhat silly that it does, because not only is the  program not infected, it is being qualified as being infected by something that has no identification anywhere else on earth.

from Neowin

The AVG Virus scanner identifies all iTunes/iPod related files as the ‘Small.BOG’ trojan - a trojan which does not seem to exist, as revealed by a quick Google search. The update, which is unidentified, but confirmed to be a false positive, is removing all files, and deleting them. Once these files have been “cleaned”, iTunes will not run, and is not fixable by a reinstall

My problems with AVG as of late have been that many things, known to be without problem, are consistently identified as being infected. Among these things are many small utilities from Donation Coders, or any one of many small one-purpose utilities.

I find this behavior annoying, but what is more annoying is the fact that, once reported to AVG, the repair is so excruciatingly slow in coming, if at all. I have files, reported by me, then acknowledged by them, as fixed, which still cause AVG to stumble and state that the file is infected.

By the way, no one antivirus is perfect, which is why sometimes it is good to run about thirty of them. Not on your computer, but over the internet.

Virus Total is a place to do that. If you have a file you suspect, the best thing to do is upload it to Virus Total, and within a few minutes at most, you will get a conclusive yes or no on infection status.

This is the place where I have found that many files, suspected by AVG, are actually fine. For those inquisitive souls who use software cracks, I  have come by many that are shown as infected, but come up clean. This includes many of the no-disc cracks for games. I always check, but I tend to believe that anything that is named ‘crack’ is flagged by AVG. (Not lately, but a couple of years ago, I renamed a text file to crack.exe, and the file was seen as a problem. You make the call.) These types of files are a wonderful time to try out Virus Total.

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