Just wanted to make a comment about the slow antivirus (free version) download from the avast! domain.
The download is REALLY slow, even on my 20mb/s connection, and since I don’t trust getting it from anywhere else but from the source, I have no other options. It would be nice if there was an option to select a mirror to get it from.
I tried improving the speed before and after uninstalling AVG, and even in safe mode with networking. I even tried downloading the full english version from both of my Linux machines but had the same results.
I would think that it would be wise to improve on ways for people to get this free version since there seems to be a large increase of unhappy AVG people out there. I’m one of them. I decided to test out avast for awhile (based on reviews and friend recommendations) before recommending it to my other friends.
I really hope it lives up to all I’ve heard about it. I’m really excited to be free from the chains of AVG. They have really gone downhill!
And just like magic, after yet another unsuccessful attempt at a download, I rebooted again and not into safe mode, tried again, and got it at 521 KB/sec. It seems that every single time I post about something in a forum, that something magically works the moment I do it. =O
Thanks for the quick reply. I guess the slow download problem was a fluke.
Were you trying to download the small 300KB on-line installation file as in the past some people have experienced problems with this (not slow download though) rather than the full download off-line installation file of about 38MB ?
If so I would suggest, downloading the full off-line setupeng.exe file:
Download the latest version of avast http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html and save it to your HDD, somewhere you can find it again. Use that when you reinstall. Ensure that you scroll down and select the avast direct download link for the English version and not Cnet as that is for an on-line installation (not what you want to do).
A download manager shouldn’t make any difference other than to be able to resume a failed/dropped connection. I use a download manager and average about 1MB per 3.3 minutes on a good connection day.
If you are on dial-up it is impossible to exceed its maximum 62kbps, minus line degradation, so you are seeing 48kilo bits per second (48,000 / 8 /1024, gives KB per second 5.86), that should work out at about 1MB per 3.5 minutes, so I don’t see how a 40MB download can take only 10-15 minutes. So I would say you are using the wrong figures not 48kbps but 48 KB per second or 393,216kbps.
There are some accelerator services like on-speed which route your downloads through their server and compress it before forwarding to you, where the program receives and unpacks it. This however doesn’t work very well with .exe files which are either compressed or not easily compressed. For the short time I used the service I saw no appreciable difference and got my money back.
I find that one of the biggest factors in download speed (other than your connection speed, obviously, particularly dialup-vs-broadband) is how efficient the server you’re downloading from is. Some are terrible – from MS or Mozilla, I’m lucky to get 6 or 7 KB/sec average mostly due to long pauses when nothing at all is coming in.
But with a really good server which permits resume (necessary to get the benefits of multiple sections, e.g., with Free Download Manager), I can typically get 25-30 KB/sec per section (probably my ISP’s limit), or up to 250-300 KB/sec total depending on how many sections the download site will permit. In practice, I’m getting just about a 60x improvement over my old dialup, and can count on 12-15 MB/min, maybe 18 on a good day, compared with about the same amounts per hour before.