AVG 8.0: Tech Support

I have used AVG Technologies anti-virus for several years now based on a recommendation from a friend when I got fed up with Norton. AVG is nice and unobtrusive and has saved me from several virus sent to me by spammers.

Currently I use the AVG Anti-Virus Network Edition v7.5 for all my production development laptops and the Small Business Server 2003 box. It rocks. All the updates come to the server and are pushed to the laptops. I can schedule things in one place and I am assured that all the laptops will conform to the schedule. Not pure magic, but definitely pure pleasure.

Last week I was working on my test machine and noticed my subscription expired. This one machine is using a single license of AVG Anti-Virus v7.5 so I hit the AVG site and purchased a single license, which is good for two years. My five pack on the network edition is all used up and I didn't feel the need to purchase another 5 licenses that will expire this November.

The new license is for AVG 8.0. Lately I have hesitated to upgrade to the latest and greatest of things because I have found I battle changes/bugs more than enjoy new features. AVG has proven to me to work well in the past so I decided to take the shot. Worse case, I only have to uninstall on one machine.

The install went fine, but for some reason the program could not reach the update files. I tried many things to set the proxy through the firewall without any luck. Hardware issue - well you know how much I love this stuff. I posted a trouble ticket on the AVG site. A couple of days later I get an email with some suggestions, but none of them worked. I responded to a couple of questions and waited a couple of days to get some diagnosis files to run with the AVG diag software. I ran the diagnosis config and it is able to email the results to AVG. Interesting how I can email to their domain, but cannot get the download files. I guess if the diagnosis file did not make it to the tech support folks this would reveal something they needed to know {g}. This revealed a problem with the ISA Server firewall running on the server. Apparently AVG changed the update sites and my firewall was blocking them. The settings were pretty easy, and once they were cleared on the server everything worked fine.

Their email tech support is very professional and very helpful, but definitely a little slow in between emails. I am just glad I did updated the one license before treading the updates for the network edition. I definitely would not have appreciated five machines being without proper AV protection for a week.