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Reviews For AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition version 8.0.1 build 100
Average Rating: 4 Based On 4 Reviews


Date: May 10, 2008, 11:14:08am


user: gepley
computer: Intel Celeron D, 3.33GHZ, 2 GB RAM
operating system: Windows XP Media Center
screen reader: JAWS 9
rating: 2
comments: If it ain't broke, don't fix it... or, if it ain't broke, at least don't break it when you try to fix it. That's basically what I told AVG Technologies... no longer Grisoft, the makers of AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, version 8.

Unfortunately, like many other companies, this one just couldn't leave a good thing alone. Previous versions, such as the 7 series, have always been very accessible, with the use of standard Windows controls, like buttons, tabs, option buttons, checkboxes, list boxes, tree views and the like. Just tab around, or press an Alt hotkey combination. Simple and elegant... which is what a user interface, particularly on utility software, such as anti-virus, anti-spyware, or other system utility software, should be.

But I was greatly disappointed when I downloaded and installed the new version 8.

First of all, unless you go to their web site, or unless you just happen to try to install version 8, and perhaps discover this, you won't know that installing version 8 will conveniently uninstall version 7.5, which is probably what most AVG users are running. Because the program shows up in the Add/Remove Programs list with a specific version number in the software title, 7.5, when I see something like that, I always uninstall the program, because you can't rely on every company thinking of performing an uninstall for you when you put in the new version.

Update: I tried installing version 8 both ways, by uninstalling version 7.5, then installing version 8, and, by trying to install version 8, with version 7.5 currently installed. In my opinion, you'll have a more pleasant installation experience if you uninstall version 7.5 first, then install version 8... and the reason's because your system wants to be restarted after uninstalling version 7.5, but version 8 wants to drop into a little configuration wizard after install, and the two conflict with one another, leaving you with an unpleasant installation experience.

Installation was accessible, though I do tire of the very irritating "less font greater, greater less, greater less" and so forth and so on chatter as you progress through the install screens. This is what I've encountered using JAWS on any computer I've ever tried to install AVG on. The installation folder has changed in version 8, with an AVG folder inside the Program Files folder, rather than the former Grisoft folder in the same location, so once you install AVG version 8, you may want to take a look in your Program Files folder and delete the Grisoft folder if it's still there, since you really won't need the Grisoft folder any longer.

Update: AVG Technologies has dropped support for AVG 7.5 as of around the end of May 2008, so if you don't like or want to use AVG version 8, you'll need to seek another solution.

Update: During installation, on about the sixth screen, titled AVG Security Toolbar, the Yes checkbox is checked to install this toolbar by default. I tried AVG 8 both ways, with this toolbar installed, and without it. My experience was that internet browsing was significantly slower with the toolbar installed than without it installed. I didn't find the toolbar's functions significantly useful enough to justify significantly slower internet browsing. The toolbar claims to label your search links in Yahoo, to identify potentially harmful web sites, but all I ever saw listed were three conditions... unknown, void(0) and blocked. I don't know what void(0) means. I'm guessing that maybe, sometimes, there might be a void(1) or void(5), the numbers indicating a level of "harm", but no matter what sorts of harmful web site searches I tried to run, from adult material to pirated software, I never encountered anything but the three conditions listed above. I don't know... maybe it's better for sighted users, but, I must evaluate based on what JAWS tells me. I haven't really noticed any problems running without the toolbar installed.

Your first sign of trouble's the "Configuring your AVG Protection" dialog, which appears after installation's complete. This is currently a seven step first-run wizard. The buttons... such as Help or Next >, lack the usual keyboard shortcuts, so you can't, for example, Alt+N for the Next > button as you proceed through the wizard. The various options you're presented with, as you proceed through the wizard, are okay, as defaults go, but if you want to know what they are, you'll need to use your JAWS cursor to read the dialog from top to bottom, and if you want to change anything, you'll need to use your numeric pad slash key to left mouse click on the item to get focus to move to the options section of the specific step you're on. Once you do this, you can tab around easily enough, but the < Back, Help and Next > buttons are no longer in the tab order, so you'll need to use the JAWS cursor to left mouse click on the Next > button to proceed to the next step. There's just no excuse for this wizard being designed this way. It's not the first time I've encountered something like this, but it's very annoying if you're a screen reader user.

I'm sure AVG has their reasons for building the dialog this way, but as a computer programmer myself, I know the less than a day's work it would've taken to design this dialog so screen reader users could just conveniently tab through the options and have keyboard shortcuts, at least for the buttons for proceeding forward or backward through the wizard. It's no major programming challenge to make it friendlier for screen reader users. As I pointed out earlier, the default options seem okay, so it's possible to just keep ensuring you're on the Next > button, pressing spacebar on it until you reach the Finish button at the end of the seven step process.

Update: Prior to JAWS version 9.0.2169U, attempts to open the AVG User Interface resulted in a crash dialog of AVGUI.EXE with the Send, Don't Send error report buttons. I still feel this is an AVG error, not a Freedom Scientific error, but, at any rate, FS addressed the crash so AVG 8 no longer crashes when trying to open the User Interface.

Upon opening the AVG 8 User Interface, it's immediately obvious that AVG significantly altered the AVG 7 style user interface. Attempts to use the tab key to move focus around the user interface are pointless. I did notice that you could use the arrow keys to move from item to item, within what I'd call a pane or frame of controls, and that a press of the Tab key moved focus to another pane or frame, where the arrow keys would move among another set of controls. However, it didn't seem possible to move the focus back to the first pane of controls, once focus was in the second pane or frame.

This isn't good. As a programmer of over 25 years, I happen to know it wasn't necessary for AVG to alter the user interface this radically, just to add some new features. As a general rule, the user interface of any software isn't fixed to the functions or features of the software. In other words, if you have a feature or function in a software, there are a variety of ways you can allow the user of the software to access that feature or function. You're not, for example, forced to use a standard Windows button control. You could use some sort of hotkey, or a button, or both, or even add a graphic or piece of text that isn't accessible, but nevertheless works. So when a software company creates a user interface for their software, and it's not accessible to persons who require screen reading software to use it, that's nothing but the politics of business getting in the way. I also happen to know that it requires very little programming effort to make software with an accessible user interface. For some reasons, the makers of utility software, like system cleanup, anti-virus, anti-spyware, file recovery, registry management, and other basic utility software, seem to think they've gotta have eye candy in such programs so sighted users will use or buy their product, and that's just stupid. Who cares how cute such software is? It's utility software, and it's purpose is to provide some utility to your computer. If you want eye candy, use software that lets you add eye candy to your computing experience, but leave the user interface of utility software plain and simple... and accessible... so you don't alienate a large portion of your end users.

AVG 8 continues to suffer from some issues that have existed since I began using AVG back around version 7, and these problems were probably in version 6 as well. When you do try to open the user interface, you tend to need to select the item in the right-click context menu more than once, and, the resulting window that opens doesn't immediately gain focus. I'm sure it appears on screen immediately for sighted users, but it's not in focus. It just appears to be. This is a programming mistake that's easy to fix, but AVG apparently isn't interested in addressing it. Therefore, you must Alt+Tab away from your focus, then Alt+Tab again to get the AVG window in focus.

You're best bet for accessing any feature of the software is to use the menus across the top of the user interface. These work as you'd expect menus to work. However, once you access a particular feature this way, there'll be lots of times that you must use the JAWS cursor, or whatever reading feature's available in your particular screen reader that allows you to read over the entire window, to see what's going on. This was required to some degree in prior versions of AVG, but in my opinion, it's much worse in AVG 8... at least it's necessary to use the JAWS cursor in more spots than in prior versions. Reading the window this way will be somewhat confusing, but you have no choice if you want to use AVG's solution. This is the main reason I gave this program a 2 rating. Software can't be said to be "accessible" simply because you provide menus to access it's features, especially when you force the user to read a poorly organized screen with all sorts of information mixed together, which is what you're forced to do in this case. AVG 8's user interface is about as accessible as a lot of Microsoft's or any other vendor's software that they claim to be accessible, when, in truth, all they've done is provide just enough so-called accessibility so they can say their software's accessible, even though it really isn't as accessible as it could, and should, be. Again, the politics of business. Sometimes I wonder what Microsoft's so-called Accessibility division does when they go to work every day, because I see little evidence of their work. But that's a soapbox issue with me, so... back to our review.

Scan times were three to four times longer than in version 7... in my case, about 200 minutes versus about 50 minutes. Therefore, I recommend going into the user interface, Tools menu, Advanced settings, scroll down to the Schedules item in the tree list of options, pop it open with the right arrow key, down arrow to the Scheduled scan item, tab to the combo box that says "Every day", and change it to some specific day of the week, such as every Wednesday. You can tab to the time and change that to, if you like. This will at least reduce the scheduled scan time to once a week, rather than every day. If you're concerned about spyware on your computer between once-a-week scans, use another software to perform such scans. While it's certainly possible to reduce AVG 8's scan time by telling it to ignore certain areas during the scan, I don't recommend doing this. Better to do a comprehensive scan once a week than to cheat by ignoring certain areas during a daily scan, possibly ending up with an infection of some sort.

Update: I understand that many blind users are switching over to Avast Anti-virus Home Edition. My issue with this product is having to register for a license key, whereas AVG at least generates one automatically for you. The Avast registration process isn't accessible as of May 22, 2008, because it uses a Captcha graphic. Avast does claim to register blind users who email support, but in my opinion, this isn't good enough. I went through a much less pleasant experience with Avast support, received three mysterious emails out of the blue, all of which contain the same license key, two of the three emails exact duplicates, one of them telling me I'm registered, but failing to provide me with my user name and password. I understand the license key only lasts between 12 and 14 months, then you must go through this whole process again, especially since you don't know your user name and password you're supposedly registered under. I also have both a desktop and a laptop I use regularly, and Avast told me I had to register each one under a different email address. Nothing but a big pain in the butt. I also wasn't impressed with the Avast scan, as it kept stopping, waiting for me to tell it what to do with something it found, rather than just presenting me with results at the end, and there's no way to run a scheduled scan in the free version without a rather advanced "kludge" that's beyond all but intermediate to advanced users. Avast also doesn't seem to care about accessibility, since JAWS users apparently must tweak the settings a bit for friendlier screen reader use. Very, very sloppy.

One thing you'll notice, as you read over the AVG 8 user interface window with the JAWS cursor, is an item at the very bottom of the window which reads "Hide notification, button". This is an annoying little pane or frame in the user interface that you can't turn off, where various irrelevant messages are displayed. You can click this button, which will then change to say "Show notification, button", but the next time you restart your computer, the damn thing will be back again, saying "Hide notification, button". I did locate a little trick, after a lot of research on the internet, which seems to work, which will eliminate the presence of this notification area. Do understand, if you use this trick, that some future AVG program updates may "undo" the trick, and you may need to reapply it. The below trick won't harm the software, and it's easy enough to undo the trick if you need to do so. The below trick is immediate... that is, you don't need to restart your computer or anything.

Follow the below steps to disable the appearance of the irritating AVG 8 notification area:
1. Open Notepad or another plain text editor.
2. Copy and paste the following three lines from this page into the text editor:
@echo off
ren avgmwdef_us.mht avgmwdef_us.mht.bak
ren avgresf.dll avgresf.dll.bak
3. Save the text document containing the above three lines in the location where AVG 8 is installed. By default, this will be C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8. Save the file as something like "AVGNotifyOff.bat", without the quotes. It really doesn't matter how you name the file, so long as you can identify it, and it ends in the ".bat" extension, so Windows sees it as a batch file.
4. Once the file's saved, close the text editor, navigate in Windows Explorer or My Computer to C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8, locate the batch file document you saved in step 3 above, and you should be able to run the file by pressing and releasing the Enter key. All the batch file does is rename two files with a ".bak" (backup) extension, so the files are still there, it's just that AVG can't see them any more, and you should find that the bottom line of the AVG user interface window no longer displays the "Hide notification, button" item.

Note: Trying to run the batch file more than once is useless unless an AVG program update has replaced the two files which have been renamed. This trick is subject to stop working if AVG releases a program update which uses a different method to display the irritating notification.

If you should want or need to undo the above trick, all you need to do is navigate to C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8, locate each of the two files with a ".bak" extension, press and release the F2 function key to bring up the rename dialog, press the End key to move the cursor to the end of the filename, then press and release the Backspace key four times to delete the ".bak" extension, then press and release the Enter key to keep the new name. This procedure must be done twice, once for each of the two files with the ".bak" extension. However, you shouldn't need to undo the trick.

Conclusion: With the release of JAWS version 9.0.2169U, AVG 8 no longer crashes when trying to open the AVG User Interface window. If you can tolerate the less accessible user interface, the software otherwise seems to do a good job. However, pay attention to the following items to ensure a more pleasant installation and use experience...
1. Uninstall your previous version of AVG using the Add or Remove Programs control panel, restart your computer, as advised, then install AVG version 8.
2. Don't install the AVG Security Toolbar. You'll find this on about the sixth screen during installation. Just make sure the "Yes" checkbox is unchecked.
3. Ensure that all the checkboxes in the LinkScanner item in the AVG User Interface window, Tools menu, Advanced settings, LinkScanner item are unchecked.
4. Adjust the Scheduled scan frequency in the AVG User Interface window, Tools menu, Advanced settings, Schedules, Scheduled scan item is set to run on a specific weekday, rather than the default, "Every day".
5. If you don't want to see the irritating notification pane in the AVG User Interface window, apply the "kludge" or "trick" found above in this review.

(review last updated on June 14, 2008)


Date: August 06, 2008, 4:09:07pm


user: emerson
computer: dual core
operating system: XP Home
screen reader: Jaws
rating: 5
comments: I switched back to AVG after using NOD32 for a couple years. I had no trouble installing AVG 8; I suspect the build is higher than the other reviewer's build number. I am primarily a braille user, and had no trouble with installation; I don't like scheduling scans, and was able to turn off scheduling from within installation, by turning on the Jaws cursor and arrowing through the screen. Thus far, I've had no trouble with the interface either. After working for three decades in programming and technical writing, with braille displays and optacons to access screens on both PCs and mainframes, I guess I'm used to quirky interrfaces, so using the Jaws cursor a few times doesn't bother me. Maybe I'm just "used to the abuse" as my colleagues used to say. I am grateful for the simpler AVG setup and its ability to work quietly in the background. I think they've improved things over versions 6 and 7. If you use structured mode in Jaws braille settings, you'll know what sort of list boxes and dialogs you're dealing with, so there's no need to figure out if you're in a box, tree view or list.

Date: September 06, 2008, 6:20:03pm


user: DanielD67
computer: Athlon64 X2 3800+ 2 GHz 2 GB DDR2
operating system: Windows XP Pro SP3
screen reader: No
rating: 5
comments: I have the trial version of AVG Anti-Virus 8.0.169 build 1359 released on 25 august 2008 and I had the same problem when trying to open the AVG User Interface: 3 from 4 attempts resulted in a crash dialog of AVGUI.EXE with the Send, Don't Send error report buttons.
I applied your little trick to eliminate the presence of the notification area from user interface window and the problem seems to disappear.


Date: September 12, 2008, 8:52:07pm


user: jajoehl
computer: Dell Inspiron
operating system: Windows Vista
screen reader: JAWS for Windows version 9.0, System Access to Go
rating: 4
comments: I am currently at a sister's computer writing this review, because I upgraded her AVG to the latest update of version 8.0. She is a JAWS user. I had no problems installing the software, but I wish that the erroneous characters that seem to appear in all dialogues were somehow done away with. I also wish that some of the panes during the setup process were read correctly by JAWS version 9.0. I didn't have all the problems that the previous reviewer had, but when I am back home at my apartment later this weekend I'm going to try using System Access to Go in order to install AVG version 8.0. I purposely removed AVG from my computer for this reason, and because for whatever reason Klango Player version 1.31 doesn't like AVG.



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