It's obvious from all these thousands of messages about AVG 8 that the free version has left out some key components that users apparently found useful. There's a saying though, and 9 times out of 10, it's so true. You get what you pay for.
Recently in his LJ,
My computer is a big investment, and I don't want to sink any more money into it than I have to. To me though, this means keeping it free of viruses and other problems. In the ideal world, we wouldn't have viruses, or the need to run software to keep them from happening. This isn't the ideal world though, and the reality is, people need to keep this in mind. After the virus has done its work it's too late. By that time, the damage is done, and if you can't afford to get your computer fixed, you're sitting there, unable to do anything with it, and hopefully realizing that the situation could have been avoided.
Yes, I feel very strongly about this, having seen problems on so many different machines using AVG. These programs aren't there to look pretty, they're supposed to do a job. If they're not, what's the point. I've had people say that they've used AVG for years and never had any problems. Great, but do you really KNOW that you haven't had any problems? Have you tried running an alternative program to see if it picks up anything? How's your machine running? Is it slow, crashes a lot, and just generally doing weird abnormal things?
Okay, I'm going to quit now. This whole thing just frustrates me obviously, and since I spend so much time trying to fix these messes, and I just know that in so many cases they could be avoided.