I do have privacy issues with GrimeFighter. I cannot see what is the problem in detail and I cannot fix it by myself. I also want to know how much access does the remote agent have over the pc and if you log any details about the pc.
The problem was, that everbody, who downloaded and installed ‘9.0.2009’ early ( e.g. on 20131202) had no chance NOT to choose the installing of GF.
If anybody of those activated GF (like I did) had trouble.
After 3 hours of waiting and only 3 window changes with comments like ‘Downloading image …’ my machine was like ‘Antarctica’, deeply frozen!
In your opinion. That’s not widely spread as I see the reactions here.
I don’t like Cleaning and antivirus software get mixed up together. If you are concerned with cluttered PC’s, make it a separate program.
Sometimes we encounter a computer that is infected so deep in the system files that it is impossible to clean and repair it while running on the same system. We need to boot to a separate system and fix these core files. To do this we have to have our own OS that we can boot into and make these changes. That's what GF really is: an operating system focused on cleaning and repairing systems that would have been lost otherwise.
And this would be fine if a) we were told what it is that needs be “cleaned”, and/or b) GF stuck to running ONLY if such a situation as he stated existed. IOW, it says to run it when it discovers, in the opinion of the software authors, “grime”, and I have too many systems damaged or worse, bricked, due to such registry cleaners and system speedup applications to trust anyone else’s opinion as to what can safely be removed from my system, unless it is a virus. But to attempt to get rid of “grime” for me, is pushing the limits of what I want an AV for. IF I wanted that, there are many such applications out there that I could try. I don’t need/want one in an AV that less sophisticated users are going to trust and believe in, possibly resulting in more work for me fixing what the true result is, and in damage to my rep for having advised the installation of Avast in the first place.
You are completely right. GF was aimed at beginner users that just need a quick fix. A more verbose mode for advanced users is needed.
The core difference between rescue disk and GF is that GF works out of the box even on already infected pc. Rescue disk has to be created prior to infection.
Sad, but true. Well, but only avast files (protected by self-defense, hopefully) and some (four?) Windows files are copied to the Rescue Disk. What’s the point of RD if it’s contaminated by local files? This can be improved in avast10, it’s nothing complicated what couldn’t be fixed.
A rescue disk is created from an installation that one is satisfied with, and should be done on a regular basis.
As a user I don’t have any means of knowing that when GF has done his job, that i’m satified with the result as it gives no information whatsoever.
At the time I wrote this above message I had already installed GrimeFighter in my pc. It did download the image completely. When I ran it, the pc rebooted, and went to the grimefighter rescue screen.