AVG Free 8.0

[trastevere]

For several years I paid for Norton. For the past couple of years I have done away with Norton and used the free edion of AVG which, by all accounts, is very good. A couple of weeks ago I installed the latest edition, 8.0 and uninstalled previous editions. Last night I happened to look at the overview and saw that a full system scan had not yet been done. I ran the scan and it picked up 584 'warnings'. These were a mixture of hijacks,trojans, spyware,adware but mainly tracking cookies, a lot of which had reference to ActiveX. I googled a few of these and was shocked to find that some were really nasty and threatened to compromise the computer's operation yet AVG had listed them only as 'warnings' My daughter has been at university for the past couple of years and has her own laptop. A lot of the 'warnings' referred to her as user so they must be a couple of years old. All this prompts several questions. 1) Why didn't previous editions pick these up? 2) Does AVG consider them to not be dangerous enough to delete or place in quarantine? 3) If I deleted anything relating to ActiveX would some of these things be legitimate components essential to the computer? 4) What do I do next?

[hau kola]

You can download spyware terminator along side AVG. Ive done this and it works very well.

[vehelpfulguy]

Before AVG V8 the free product was ONLY an anti-virus product. It was ONLY looking for viruses and not spyware, malware and so on (which are different things and NOT viruses).

AVG V8 now checks for viruses AND spyware.

So many things it did not even lok for in the past it is now looking for.

Generally tracking cookies are NOT dangerous and having them on your PC will do it no harm, however some people do not like having their interent activity tracked so they remove them.

This is why AVG only lists them as warnings.

[vehelpfulguy]

You ask about ActiveX and cookies.

ActiveX is a Microsoft technology which allows web sites to download small programs to help a web site look better or offer more features.

Some people DO use ActiveX programs to hide viruses and others nasties.

As far as I know cookies are always "flat files" and not ActiveX programs so I am surprised AVG mentions tracking cookies along with ActiveX.

As far as I am aware ActiveX is ONLY used on web sites so you can happily delete anything related to Activex and it will not stop your computer working.

If a web site needs an Activex program it will download it again. If you have IE7 (and IE6 I think) it always warns you before downloading an ActiveX program.

(I will be honest and say I am not an ActiveX expert, the above answers are as understand it, but willing to listen to alternative views)

[vehelpfulguy]

If you look here on the web page for AVG8 you see for the free version there is now a tick in the Anti-virus box AND the Anti-spyware box (and Safe search which is also new)

http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download-avg-anti-v irus-free-edition

In the past for AVG free it was only Anti virus.

That is why you are getting more errors lised.

[trastevere]

Very helpful replies. Thank you

[souldriver]

Personally i found the latest version of avg to be awful, for this very reason. i have now switched to avast and adawre for spyware.