it’s unix, not eunuchs

Yesterday Lifehacker ran an interesting poll, link here, about the best anti-virus product currently available.  Many of the comments are a bit silly, but it started a conversation between me and Claus Valca that fixed a recent gripe I’ve had with AVG8.

Before I go on, I should probably explain why I don’t use one of the big AV scanners.  I use freeware anti-virus scanners at home because I’m cheap.  I used to load AVG on every computer I owned, but somehow AVG determined that I was using more copies than was legal(you can load a copy on one non-commercial computer) and they popped up a window telling me that I was breaking the law.  Now, it could have just been a scare tactic, but it made me go out and read AVG’s free license options very carefully.  And since there were other freeware options, I just diversified.

I run AVG on my most important system because it is a real-time scanner so it can prevent me from goofing up.  On the rest of the computers I run Clamwin which is nice, but will not prevent me from goofing up.  I am considering trying Avast anti-virus, but that’s for another post.

Now, I recently upgraded to AVG8.  But it has a new feature that isn’t very zippy in it’s performance.  The Link Scanner option really slows down browsing on computers, especially when you execute a google search and you get 10-50 options and the Link Scanner is checking each web page for it’s nastiness level.  Now, you can disable the option, but then you get a red exclamation point in the systray and I don’t like red things in my systray.  Red to me means bad, and I like mostly green things in my systray so that I know the system is healthy.

Claus, remember Claus?  I mentioned him at the beginning of the post, experienced this same problem and blogged about it.  Some nice, anonymous person read about his pain and sent him a command line hack to fix this problem.  It’s so awesome.  Download the binary from AVG via this link.  Save the binary to somewhere, then run it from the commandline with these two flags:

avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch

then accept all the default options, accept licenses, etc until you get to the add/remove components, repair, and some third option.  Select the add/remove components and then continue all the way through and whammo, you will have AVG8 sans Link Scanner.  You will probably have to update your virus definitions, but that’s no biggy.

Big Kudos to Claus for so thoroughly reviewing this product and to the anonymous poster who helped relieve this pain!