glee wrote:
I have been using Avast free home edition for a couple of years, and
like it very much, on both Win98 and WinXP. It is IMO far better
than AVG free edition, with far more frequent updates. I do have to
say, though, that Avast should be run on a reasonably fast
system.....anything less than a 500MHz processor and 128MB RAM and
the system may exhibit some slowdowns. Avast ran well on my old
333MHz AMD K6-2 with 128MB RAM, with only a slight and temporary
performance hit while it did its background updates.

"dan" wrote in message
...
Anyone have comments on the 'avast' anti virus home addition app. ?

Avast works the best of the "small footprint freebies" I've tried (Avast &
AVG), and the large ones are non-starters, but some people who use Windows
98, including me, are currently experiencing a major problem caused by
Avast's latest, or possibly second-to-latest, program update (not virus
pattern update) , the most recent ones being 4.7.871 and 4.7.869. What
happens is that when you open the GUI panel it freezes, so you can't do a
scan and you have to CTRL-ALT-DEL your way out. And you can't do a scan by
going into trhe directory and clicking the file either. On the other hand
some people are experiencing no problem at all.

The way I got around this situation was to uninstall the program and then
install an earlier version, 4.7.844, which I did tonight. It's available
he
http://www.filehippo.com/download_avast_antivirus/?1127

This is what's slowly doing '98 in. I've got the older but still supported
version of java installed, the end of the line unsupported Kerio, the older
but still supported Spybot, etc., and now, unless the developers come
through which IMO is by no means certain, I might have done my last A/V
program upgrade.