Avast issues

[kane_magus]

The other day, I posted about how my System Restore thing had been inexplicably set to use 50% of the drive, which was eating up way too much hard drive space, and that I'd lowered it to around 20%. Well, I checked it again just now, because I found that my hard drive was starting to mysteriously fill up again, and I noticed that the System Restore had been set back to use 50% yet again on its own.

Well, after a bit more searching on Google, it turns out that Avast is apparently the culprit behind this. Rather annoying, that. I'd already uninstalled that useless Grimefighter and SecureLine adware bullshit from Avast a while back, but had left this NG thing alone because I didn't know what it was. Now I know, and now it's uninstalled as well.

I'd switched to Avast a year or two ago because I was tired of that asinine WS.Reputation.1 bullshit that Symantec was doing (tl;dr version: it would inappropriately flag files I downloaded as "suspicious" and automatically delete them without prompting me and with no chance of recovery, meaning that I had to redownload them after disabling Symantec, and there didn't seem to be any way to permanently disable this "feature," no matter what I tried), but if Avast is going to be doing shit like the above, maybe it's time I started looking for yet another anti-virus/Internet security application.

Comments

[tokoz.livejournal.com]

I use Spybot -- Search & Destroy, and Malware Bytes for my antivirus stuff, fwiw. I don't know about their paid versions, but i feel like their free ones are pretty good

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I also have Spybot and Malware Bytes installed, and I run scans and immunizations and such with them fairly regularly, but I don't think MB has a "real-time protection" component (unless you pay for it, which I haven't), and Spybot lacks actual anti-virus components (unless you pay for them, which I haven't), so I'm not sure how good they are as dedicated replacements for a full anti-virus/Internet security suite.

I think if I did need a replacement anti-virus thing, I'd probably just give AVG (http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage) a shot, since the last time when I was looking for a replacement for Symantec, it was mostly a coin flip between AVG and Avast. I ended up going with Avast due to a recommendation from someone on Twitter, and ended up buying a 2-year subscription for it because it was relatively dirt cheap, even when compared to just a single year of Symantec. Or maybe I'd buy a license for MB or Spybot, I dunno. I'll actually probably just stick with Avast though, at least for now, since uninstalling the worse-than-useless stuff does seem to have completely disabled it, just so long as they don't silently reinstall it later, or install some other kind of annoying adware crap.