Solo Technology

My beta of Microsoft Windows Live OneCare recently expired. In general, I liked it. Did what it needed to do and didn’t seem very intrusive. The backup stuff and what-not was quite nice as well. Even the pricing was nice. But I’m cheap, so I let it expire and switched back to good ol’ AVG Free for my home computer.

AVG Free appears to have a nasty new feature: A dire dialog box warning me how I’m probably using it illegally! Click the thumbnail to the left to see it in full glory. This is pretty dang annoying and, I might add, a pretty questionable form of advertising. It smacks of the web popups that say, “Your computer is running slow, click here to fix it” and then download some commercial piece of pap onto your machine. Wife’s machine has the same thing and we have to see it every day while AVG does the updates.

I found an article at TMCnet.com that seems to explain what’s happening: AVG is detecting more than one computer from my location running the free version and thus assumes I’m a business in violation of the licensing agreement. Shame on me for having more than one machine on my home network!

This is a bummer. Maybe I will buy the OneCare thing. Set fee for up to 3 computers is starting to look more attractive.

[Update] Rich G points out that the dialog does say “Single Computer Use” only.  /sigh/  what a drag…  Now I need a lawyer to interpret that dialog favorably. 

4 Responses to “AVG Free, What the heck is this?”

1. » pingback » Active Virus Shield » Solo Technology on June 1st, 2007 11:05 am
   
   
2. » pingback » Antivirus And Backup Changes » Solo Technology on January 29th, 2008 8:56 pm
   
   
3. Karel on January 30th, 2008 12:24 am
   

   The above statements are actually not true.
   AVG Free edition is intended for home use only. There were two (very short - cca 1 week) campaigns last year when users with Active Directory / MS Windows domain active on their network were notified using the dialog above. It was only a notification and for one week only. You can use AVG Free edition on as many computers at home as you want, if you really do not use it for commercial purposes

4. Chris Kasten on January 30th, 2008 6:51 am
   

   Karel - that’s great to hear! Thanks for the update.

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