Grisoft's AVG 9 - My experience updated

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Not long ago I wrote a blog on my disastrous update to AVG 9.0 from 8.5 (paid version).  Since then I have come to a conclusion about the software in question.  Even though I provided a number of different logs and information to the AVG support group, they said they couldn't help me with my problem unless I reinstalled AVG and sent them the minidump log from another BSOD.  That's all well and good for them, but I can't afford to keep blue screening my work computer so that they can solve their software problems. 

I decided that as good as AVG 9 looked (and thank goodness it is less of a resource hog than 8.5), I could do without it and immediately replaced it with 2 other pieces of software.

When Grisoft gets AVG 9 in better shape I will revisit it as a antivirus/firewall alternative.

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AVG Upgrade to 9.0 and the Blue Screen Of Death

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I use AVG anti-virus / anti-malware software, among others, on my work computer. I like to keep everything up to date to make sure my computer doesn't get infected. So when the AVG software popped up a notice saying I could get a free upgrade to version 9 from version 8.5, I went for it - my bad!

AVG is excellent software, don't get me wrong. But when I upgraded to version 9 (which is said to be 6x faster and uses less resources than 8.x), it recommended uninstalling my other software, Symantec AV Corporate edition (which my college requires) and Sophos AV (which I was testing).

Once I uninstalled those pieces of software (this should be done automatically from the installer - I had to remove the software and restart the installer). I restarted the installer which then upgraded my version 8.5 to version 9.00. That's when my problems started.

I was going through the various components (it looked really really good - even had it's own firewall - which turns off windows firewall BTW), when I came upon the Rootkit scanner. I decided to try it out - That's when I got the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD)! I recovered from that and started researching the problem. AVG had some suggestions on their website, which turned out to be okay. Microsoft came back with a message after the error reporting went in that I had a bad driver (hardware or software) on my system.


When I came in this morning - another BSOD awaited me. After recovering from that I saw that a message I sent to AVG tech support was waiting for me in my inbox. I started to answer it when I got another BSOD. I restored my system to an earlier state (before the upgrade) and finished answering the email to AVG then started straitening out my system.

I'm hoping that AVG will be able to solve this quickly, because what I saw of the 9.00 version looked really nice and I like AVG a lot better than the Symantec product we are using here.