AIS Customer Feedback

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

As someone who upgraded from Avast 4.8 free home edition to AIS I guess I may be in an Avast customer target category, so I thought it may be useful to provide them with some feedback on why I bought their product, and my experience of it to date.

(I don’t normally provide unsolicited (or even solicited) feedback to vendors, but since Avast gave me a good free service for so long I’ll make an exception. Also I never felt entitled to have any gripes at all about the free product - after all it was provided for nothing!

So that they can categorise me in their marketing scheme - I’m closer to the grave than the cradle (unless some local age records are broken), and I am no sort of IT expert - I use computers and the internet as tools, and want them to work with the minimum of input from me. I use XP SP3, AIS, and SAS Pro.

I upgraded to AIS because:
(i) it claimed to provide a silent two-way firewall - I’ve always found two-way firewalls I’ve used before too troublesome, but have had a nagging concern (from reading forums like these - which always serve to make we IT illiterate feel nervous) that the XP firewall alone may not be enough.
(ii) having used the Avast free service for so long I felt it was time I paid them something (if nobody paid the service would fold - and when I’m older and poorer I hope Avast free is still out there).

So far I am pretty pleased with the product. The firewall is silent, as advertised. I have no way of knowing it it’s any good - but it feels reassuring - in fact the whole user interface just seems to say “don’t worry - we’ve got everything under control” - which as long as they have is great.

I have had a few problems though:

The Firewall turns itself off and won’t turn on when using the XP limited rights guest account. I’d always thought it was probably safer against hackers to use a limited rights account than to be always logged in as an administrator. I know some other users have also reported problems with the AIS Firewall refusing to turn on with XP. Fortunately I have no problems when logged in on other accounts - but for the Firewall to fail to run on any account is not a good thing - and eroded some of the reassuring feeling I had.

The sandpit seems unstable with Google Chrome - leading to BSOD problems. I prefer Firefox to Chrome - so this doesn’t actually cause me much of a problem - but it had me worried for a while.

Overall I think I would categorise myself as a satisfied rather than a delighted customer so far.

Hope this is some help to you at Avast - maybe others who have paid for the product can add their opinions.

2

@MAG - Thanks for your input. A couple of things in your post caught my attention, leading to two questions:

The Firewall turns itself off and won’t turn on when using the XP limited rights guest account … I know some other users have
also reported problems with the AIS Firewall refusing to turn on with XP…

I always log in as Administrator, and have never been able to get aIS Firewall to run at all. Each time I start Windows (since I purchased the license), I get the message from Windows Security that “no firewall is running”, and from aIS “Firewall is turned off.” Clicking “turn on” has no response, so I’ve been using the Windows Firewall. (I’m running XP SP3.)

Q1: Have the folks you know found a solution for this issue?

The sandpit seems unstable with Google Chrome - leading to BSOD problems. I prefer Firefox to Chrome

I use Firefox almost exclusively. Since installing aIS, almost everyday I get a pop-up dialog “Script not responding” with Google Chrome in the path of script’s name.

Q2: Can you elaborate on your comment for a novice user (eg, what’s BSOD and whether I should be concerned)?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

3

I’m still wondering about those firewall & xp problems that are reported. I installed ais on my xp system and everything is just smooth and running.

Has any antivirus- or antispyware-sw or firewall been installed prior to avast5? Or is still installed?

Have you tried to go to add/delete programs on windows control panel, select avast, start the installer, scroll down and choose repair? Maybe this will solve the problem.

Whatever I try, I can’t reconstruct this problem on my xp-system.

4

@Zyndstoff - Thanks for trying to reproduce the problem

Has any antivirus- or antispyware-sw or firewall been installed prior to avast5? Or is still installed?

Have you tried to go to add/delete programs on windows control panel, select avast, start the installer,
scroll down and choose repair? Maybe this will solve the problem.

In my case, I had Norton Internet Security, AVG, and Malware installed / used Norton’s uninstall to delete Norton / installed avast! Free / used Add/Remove to delete AVG / used Add/Remove to delete avast! Free / installed aIS / had problems, used Add/Remove to repair aIS (didn’t resolve problems) then to delete Malware and aIS / reinstalled aIS, now working (except for Firewall).

So, supposedly there’s nothing else still installed other than aIS, but perhaps there’s still some left-overs from one of the previous programs…

Thanks for your feedback.