How To: Install AVG Free 8 Without LinkScanner and Remove The Pop-Up Notification
Sunday, June 8th, 2008Users of AVG Free 7.5 will have no doubt been harried by AVG with pop-up notifications telling you to upgrade to AVG8. Unhelpfully the link points to the paid version; one now has to dig through pages on the AVG website to find the free version which does still exist!
However, it’s a small mercy. AVG, the new company name for Grisoft, the manufacturers of AVG anti-virus software have decided to put a lot of bloat in their once streamlined software. A pop-up notification now greets the user attached to the bottom of the Control Centre and a new component, the LinkScanner, which may be thought of as well intentioned but it duplicates functionality that is already built into Firefox. Furthermore, when the LinkScanner is disabled it puts AVG8 into a constant sense of panic: the tray icon starts to constantly report that something is wrong, signalling this with an exclamation mark over the tray icon.
After a quick search I found this article which not only shows you how to install AVG8 without the LinkScanner but how to remove the annoying notifications. I reproduce these in my own words below.
Installing AVG8 Without LinkScanner
- Uninstall AVG7.5 first through the ‘Add/Remove Software’ menu in ‘My Computer’.
- Download AVG Free 8 from here, choose the link that says ‘Download AVG Free 8.0 (AVG server)‘.
- Rename the file to ‘
avgfree8.exe‘. - Move or copy the file to ‘C:\’ hard drive or the primary windows hard drive.
- Open a command prompt by going to ‘Start -> Run’ and typing ‘cmd’.
- Type ‘
cd\‘ (That’s a backslash) - And then copy the following text and paste it into the command prompt you opened by right-clicking:
avgfree8.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch - Follow through the installation but decline to install the toolbar and deny permission to share information with AVG.
Removing the Control Centre Pop-Up Notification
- Navigate to ‘C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8′, or wherever you installed AVG8.
- Rename the files: ‘
avgmwdef_us.mht‘ and ‘avgresf.dll‘ by adding ‘.disabled‘ to the end of each.
So they will become: ‘avgmwdef_us.mht.disabled‘ and ‘avgresf.dll.disabled‘ respectively.