AVG 7 Free - Server Angst

[bazcook]

As many of you who use AVG 7 Free have discovered, there has been some server angst at Grisoft since the beginning of the year.

The fact that Grisoft's own AVG Forum now has a thread devoted to griping about the significant failure of the AVG 7 Free's Update service should tell us all something - especially as its been set up by the Forum's Moderators.

The fact that this thread exists at all should be telling Grisoft that they have a problem that is in danger of losing them subscribers (both Free and those that might consider upgrading to their retail product) and it is only a matter of time before the problem becomes 'common knowledge' on the web and in computer print media. If that happens, they will - quite literally - not be able to give their products away.

Grisoft had server angst last year too with AVG 6 but at least there were work-arounds posted very soon thereafter to alter the url.ini file to add other download sites. Not so with AVG 7, though it *seemed* okay until the beginning of the year. Grisoft says they have over 1 million Free users, yet their server bank for Free users appears to be a couple of 486s in somebody's closet in Prague.

More importantly than practically anything else, Grisoft needs to get some mirrors up and running, download new contact addresses into a patch for AVG 7 Free and try and restore some of the considerable goodwill they've lost in less than a month.

Yes, some of us can manually download the updates until there is solution - if ever - but why should we have to? That's not the way the product intended us to use it and does not encourage users to keep up-to-date.

Anti-Vir and Avast! will be picking up some of the freebie users otherwise - and people who resent the bloated and forced 'subscription rates' of the commercial products may even go back to them.

Heck of a business model....

[TechZ]

true. They need to get it together or people are just gonna try the other free alternatives, I've switched to Avast for one of my PC's already, even before AVG7 was released.

[bazcook]

OK - rather like the work-around for AVG 6, here is a recent posting -

"...In the meantime I discovered that the trick with the hosts file worked also for me, as it did with others users on this forum.

For those of you running Windows XP or 2000:

- go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
- open the HOSTS file in this directory with Notepad or any other text editor
- add the following line:

193.86.103.19 guru.grisoft.com

!! note that there should be at least one free space position between the IP adress and the host name !!

- save the HOSTS file and run the update service from AVG control centre

This worked for me."

As it did for me. The guru.grisoft.com site is the default download site for AVG 7 Free. By adding this to Hosts, 7 looks elsewhere for the download. Pity Grisoft couldn't be bothered to do this themselves...