Jonathan R. Pritchard’s Homepage

Users 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

1. Uninstall AVG7.5 first through the ‘Add/Remove Software’ menu in ‘My Computer’.
2. Download AVG Free 8 from here, choose the link that says ‘Download AVG Free 8.0 (AVG server)‘.
3. Rename the file to ‘avgfree8.exe‘.
4. Move or copy the file to ‘C:\’ hard drive or the primary windows hard drive.
5. Open a command prompt by going to ‘Start -> Run’ and typing ‘cmd’.
6. Type ‘cd\‘ (That’s a backslash)
7. 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
8. 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

1. Navigate to ‘C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8′, or wherever you installed AVG8.
2. 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.

It is criminal in my opinion for gaming devices, which are ever more popular, to support such lowly encryption methods as only WEP - which has been thoroughly hacked over and over again and is useless. All WEP encryption will stop is the man sitting outside your house in his car, typing away on his laptop, not even that really if he has any sense he can crack the key in under 15 minutes.

Related to this is the Wii, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP’s support of only 802.11b. The 802.11g protocol had been aroung long before the release of these devices yet they didn’t see fit to support this higher bandwidth protocol.

I argue that security features like this are far more important than parental controls. Having to downgrade one’s wireless security setup to something inferior such as WEP to have it supported by all devices is a terrible situation akin to being between a rock and a hard place. Do you want to lose functionality or do you want to lose security - you simply should never be put in this position by a responsible company. If this was a business grade product then it would not have been tolerated.

At least the Nintendo Wii supports WPA2-PSK (AES) but it’s far from an ideal situation. You have to sacrifice speed of the overall network to run in mixed mode and not 802.11g only mode.