The NTEN Affinity Groups are great sounding boards for folks looking for technology recommendations. Recently, inquiring minds within the 501 Tech Club DC wanted to hear opinions and experiences using AVG antivirus software -- and members responded with know-how.

Below is summary of responses from the 501 Tech Club DC thread. If you want to get involved, sign-up today free of charge and view all posts and links in their full glory at http://groups.nten.org.

Comments & Suggestions:

1. AVG has not made it on to CITI’s “good virus software list” but one of our clients who was resistant to spending more money installed it on their 5 machines. It requires administrative rights to keep it up to date, but so far no breakouts and they do have some staff that open every link and email they receive. Read the full post.
2. I’ve used AVG for the last year or so, and have never had a virus. It runs an automatic, full-system virus scan every morning at 8:00 AM (I’m sure this time is customizable) and updates automatically every day at 9:00 (again, likely customizable). I have seen only a handful of days when a definitions update has not been released, so it is probably a safe bet to assume that they are on top of things. Read the full post.
3. I currently use free AVG on my home/business laptop. I installed it after Symantec Corporate Edition had gotten a bit old and flaky. I tried a couple other free anti-virus packages, and I've apparently settled on AVG. I say apparently because I haven't thought much about it - or haven't had any problems - since installing it. It checks for updates daily and updates often enough for me. Read the full post.
4. Seems like a lot of people are telling you the same info, which is that many of us (myself included) use it at home. My experience is that it’s robust enough, but that if you want real robustness, well, you have to pay for the full product. It’s significantly less than McAfee or Norton, but you still have to pay. Of course, I’ve not tested the full product, since I don’t need it at home and am on a Mac at work, so I can’t vouch for how much more you get with the full product.

   I will warn you that the spyware module (released in the last 6 months) is not up to snuff. To test it, I took my test machine (yeah, so I’m enough of a geek that I have a test machine at home, actually just a separate HDD that I hook up and boot from) and installed known obvious spyware (Gator). It caught it and took appropriate action. Then I went to a site that did a drive-by (HuntBar) installation. It caught this and asked me if I wanted to do this. Not the best behavior, as telling me that I probably don’t want to do this and then allowing me to override would have been better, but still a passable action, though it does sort of demand better users than most of us have.

   But when I went to the Washington Post, it wouldn’t let me accept the session cookie without telling it that it was OK each time I went to a new page. Including on a long story that was continued. Then I went to ESPN to follow a hockey game on their Live feature, and it just kept popping up that I was doing something dangerous. Let’s not even discuss what it did with Salon when I didn’t give it a login and tried to use SitePass.

   This got so annoying that I turned off the spyware feature on my test machine, didn’t install it on my real HDD, and am still using AdAware and Spybot. I might miss something, but spyware is not as annoying as AVG’s behavior. Read the full post.