AVG 9 disappoints

I had previously mentioned the intrusive popup message to upgrade to AVG 9, so last night I decided the only way to avoid that irritation was to do the upgrade. Bad idea.

I thought that I had downloaded the upgrade & saved to my hard drive. But when I ran it, what I had was just a download manager which then took about 20 minutes to download the actual program. Very slowly - my Cox connection generally runs 8-10 Megs download speed, but their connection manager was reporting speeds of only 175K. That's with a "K".

The install ran OK on my HP desktop, but failed on my ThinkPad. Lucky me.

This morning I booted up the desktop to find that something was chewing up CPU and thrashing the hard drive. Turned out to be my brand-new AVG 9. I Google'd about & found lots of complaints, specifically mentioning avgchsvx.exe as the culprit. In some cases users would report that it ran for up to 2 hours upon boot-up.

Fortunately I had saved the 8.5 program on my disk, so I just uninstalled 9.0 and reinstalled the previous version, ran the Update Manager several times to get all the program & virus updates; all of which completed within 10 minutes.

AVG Nag for Nine

Here we go again, AVG version 9 is now available & announces itself right smack in the middle of your screen, stealing focus from whatever useless activity you were involved in at the time.

I still don't understand why they insist on these intrusive messages.

Cox rocks

We had a power outage last week, but when the lights came back on my 7-year-old cable modem refused to reconnect. I called my ISP, Cox Communications, and after I got past the IVR system & spoke with a tech, they were extremely helpful trying to get me back online.

Unfortunately, in spite of being plugged into surge protector, the modem was trashed, so I ran out to pick up a new one, plugged 'er in, and got back on the phone with Cox. Once again, they were very helpful & I was back online quickly.

Cox is trying to use techno-gadgetry like the interactive voice response stuff which was totally annoying, and a fairly sophisticated web page that attempts to recognize & connect your modem when you first try to access the Internet (but it failed), however, there is no substitute for great people like the techs that I spoke with. Congrats! to the tech support staff at Cox, they know their stuff.