Page 1 of 1

Anti-Virus Housekeeping (a bit off topic)

PostPosted: Sun Dec 17, 2017 9:40 pm
by Nick Pyner
There can be several lessons to be learned when your housekeeping gets slack. I bought a cheapo desktop about four years ago, the only criteria being a no-fan video card, 64bit, a W7 disk, and no junk installed. I partitioned the drive, allowing (probably) twice as much for C:\ as was already taken, i.e. 40Gb. Since then I have allowed C:\ to clog up, and the situation has lately become serious. No amount of usual cleaning would fix it, and I was getting dire messages.

THE VILLAIN was AVG. My C:\Program Files (x865)\AVG folder was 20Gb, i.e. it was taking up half the partition.

THE SOLUTION is to
1. immediately uninstall AVG entirely
2. run CCleaner and clear out any accociated junk
3. check there are no AVG folders lying aound
4. Re-install AVG from scratch, in my case on the E:\ drive, where it should have been in the first place.

THE RESULT IS
1. Yes, there is a new AVG folder on C:\. It is 80kb. I can live with that
2. The new AVG folder on E:\ is 999Mb, in other words my previous AVG - 20Gb - was 95% bloat.

THE CONCLUSION IS
This is self-inflicted. Yes there is a conspiracy between hardware and software, but there is no need to succumb, just do a clean re-install of AVG once a year. I now understand that other anti-virus programmes are just as outrageous.