[Virtualacorn-list] End of Microsoft support for Windows XP

[T.O.M.S.]

Hello folks

On Wed Apr 2 21:32:04 BST 2014, Alex Hamilton (T.O.M.S. admin at
toms12.plus.com ) sayeth re. using AVG Free 2014:

> Give me a few more days and I'll report back in more detail.

Alex and I have been running 2 installations of AVG Free 2014 and
here's what we've found to date, with recommendations:

Alex upgraded from v2012 to v2014, *retaining* his user-settings.
The upgrade went well and he found nothing untoward, with none of the
ultra 'slo-mo' performance hits which other have reported. More on
that anon.

In parallel, I first intentionally uninstalled v2012 on my own
machine - this time *dumping* the user-settings - and installed a 
paint-fresh default copy of AVG Free 2014 from www.filehippo.com.

The installation went fine - but the machine immediately went into
seriously slo-mo state, AFAICT exactly as others have reported. This
lasted for well over 1 hour, with the hard disc activity LED on
near-permanently. VirtualRPC was unusable; Windows work was seriously
degraded. Things gradually improved after 1h:15m or so, when the
computer slowly reverted to normal performance. This being Day 1, I
purposely did not investigate.

>From switch-on on Day 2, it was back to slo-mo and virtually unusable.
Investigation showed that AVG was doing a 'daily' full scan. I stopped
this and, immediately, things hugely improved. I re-started the scan
and, as Alex has reported, played around with the priority setting on
the Scan page in the control panel. I replicated what Alex has already
suggested on 2 April: the 'Basic' setting seems to be a nice
compromise between retaining computer performance and getting the scan
done (although it then takes well over 1h:30m to scan 2 x 500MB
discs.)

However, I then went through all the Options->Advanced
settings->Schedules settings, setting them up as recommended in our
VirtualRPC In Use booklet (pages 14-16). Since then, AVG Free v2014
performance has been near-identical to what we got with AVG v2012 and
before.

On that basis, I'm absolutely confident that, if you upgrade AVG Free
from v2012 to v2014, *retaining* your user-settings, you will most
likely not have to do anything more.

But if you start afresh with AVG Free 2014, you do need to set up all
the Schedules settings, manually, in order to avoid the daily slo-mo
symptoms (often from switch-on).

Alex was critical of the ergonomics of the v2014 control panel. I
fully agree. However, it's reasonably easy to work round the
shortcomings. Here's a few suggestions:

- Unlike v2012, the main control panel does not give an Update button
to enable you to do intermediate, manual updates to the anti-virus
signature files (p15 in the booklet). However, the same feature and
display is now accessible via Options->Update (4th line down).

-  The default priority setting is (I think) Medium, which results in
the slo-mo symptoms. However, you can pre-empt the problem by first
opening the control panel and clicking on Scan now. This starts a
manual scan and the scanning window appears.

-  In the Additional scan settings section at the bottom, now drag the
slider to (say) the Basic setting as discussed above. Then click on
Stop to stop the manual scan. Thereafter you should not get the 
extreme slo-mo symptoms.

-  If you want to check the results of what AVG has been up to (scan,
signature file update, etc), the method is a bit messy. In the main
control panel, the number of available reports is shown against the
Reports caption. Click on Reports to display the results of the most
recent activity. Then click on Archive report to display the previous
activity, and so on until you've seen all available reports. All gone.

No doubt there are other tweaks but I hope that's enough to be going
on with. Any problems, please do let us know and we'll push out a
composite report. HTH.

Jim Nottingham
pp T.O.M.S.



-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2014.0.4355 / Virus Database: 3722/7307 - Release Date: 04/06/14