I just received a notification from my AVG free anti-virus program that updates for version 7.5 will no longer be available by the last day of this month. The notice said I had to upgrade to version 8.0, but it did a job making me believe that the freeware would no longer be available. From reading it, it looked like the only choice was to upgrade to there paid Internet Security Suite.
At first I thought I had a big announcement to make, but after going to the Grisoft website I found out I could just download and install the newer version which is still free. So, don’t worry. AVG anti-virus software is still free, but I would go ahead an upgrade if this pertains to you. You may as well head over to download.com for the update, because that’s where Grisoft is going to send you anyway when you click on the download link.

I should not that this is not just an upgrade, but a full software download - about 45mb.

Well, the installation went well (of course I had to disable COMDO) and version 8.0 definitely got a face lift. I even got this little “Did you know” message “The number of poisoned web sites is increasing. 1 in 1000 web pages are infected with malicious drive-by downloads”. After restart all I had to do was run an update for the database. The old version of AVG free was automatically removed. I’m off to run a full system scan since I haven’t run one in a couple of weeks anyway…BAD Rick.

Well the scan finished with 838,000 objects scanned and 72 warnings. No viruses but AVG did find several occurrences of adware which it considers a “potentially dangerous object” and several tracking cookies. This even though I run AVG anti-spyware and spybot s&d regularly.