I’ve often wondered why companies offer free antivirus programs. I found out when I clicked on a badger box, which popped up on one of the older PCs, and upgraded the defence system from AVG 9 to AVG 2011. The first thing I noticed was that the boot up went on for AGES! The icons and task bar at the bottom of the desk top usually appear over my brilliant desk top picture quite quickly. With AVG 2011, it was minutes before they arrived. And my Netscape mail program wouldn’t download messages which I knew were on the server (because I went to the website and looked).
Naturally, I dumped the problem on Irwin. He got things working again eventually by booting AVG 2011 into touch and reloading version 9. 2011, he told me, is MicroSoft-style bloatware, unsuitable for the elderly PC, and it doesn’t work with something called Mozilla, which is the heart and soul of Netscape email and its descendant Firefox.
So that explains why there’s a free version of AVG. It’s a vast testing ground involving millions of users with every combination of computer hardware and software under the sun. The freebie customers are there to report problems that need to be fixed for the people with the paid-for version. So it’s sound commercial sense at the back of it, not philanthropy.
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