David, we've been using the free AVG for over a year now and I came here to see what folks thought of the upgrade to 8.0 (free or paid) as I've been ignoring the upgrade pop-up for weeks now and time is running out. What didn't you like about 8.0? Is AVG 8.0 free not a good choice for tech novices like DH and me?
I think they recently announced ongoing support for AVG 7.5 until the end of the year. (I read that somewhere, maybe here, maybe on FT's technology forum.) Check it out before you try the upgrade.
I didn't like AVG 8.0 because even just the A/V product is more than just A/V. I want my A/V product to just be a small, fast background process that just does A/V scanning only and nothing else and quietly updates itself frequently in the background without bothering me unless there's a problem.
AVG 8.0 A/V only (not the AVG 8.0 suite, which is different), also does web link scanning, spyware scanning, etc. You can turn both of those off, but if you do it through the AVG menus, you end up with the exclamation point in the system tray icon as an alert that something is wrong. If something is actually wrong, you can't tell without checking it all the time to see if it's just complaining about the disabled items or if there's an actual problem.
On one of these 2 boards, somebody posted a workaround to better disable the web link scanning portion of it by disabling the add-ons through the browser menus rather than disabling it via the AVG 8.0 A/V menus. That would solve the issue I had with notification of disabled items.
I also found that the spyware scanner in AVG 8.0 A/V wasn't very effective. It missed several common tracking cookies. The one's it missed were very common. They weren't obscure ones. I don't think this is a big deal because you don't have to use their anti-spyware part of AVG 8.0 A/V. You should be able to continue to use Spybot S&D or whatever you currently use. And it's possible that they've improved their spyware data base since I tried it.
All of the above was enough for me to dump AVG and switch to Nod32.
The other thing that's always annoying with AVG is the pop-ups like you are seeing and also the way they try to drive you to the paid product. It always confuses people to think that the free version is going away because the pop-ups from the free version direct you to the paid version for an upgrade. You can't blame them too much for trying to convert free users to paid users, but on the other hand, the way they do it confuses many users every time there's a version upgrade.
For now, I'm sticking with Nod32 on my main machine. On my other windows desktops, I'm not sure yet what I'm going to switch to. I might try out Avast, which is another free A/V product and see if I like it and if it's fast and small.
But that's just me. If you're happy with AVG 7.5, continue to use it as long as they continue to support it. If you like AVG 8.0 Free A/V, then, by all means, use it. We'll find it out in time how effective it is.
-David
