AVG Settings

[Teh Solution]

Hi Everyone,
A family friend of ours gave me her computer to fix, she says it has a virus. It was going slow and popping up ads for various web sites, pretty much the basic virus stuff here. Its a pretty decent HP Desktop running Vista. About 8 months ago I installed AVG on it for her, it was the older version of AVG 8.x, and I had set it to do nightly scans.

First thing I did on the PC was open AVG to see what the last scan looked like. There was 136 threats found, all tracking cookies. I clicked to remove them and got a meassage saying the virus vault is full do I want to delete the file, I clicked yes.

I opened the virus vault, it was full of tracking cookies (several hundred), and had a handful of trojans here and there. I emptied it, deleted all.

Then I started a full computer scan, it found 1 Trojan Downloader (I forget the name of it at the moment), and about 100 more tracking cookies. The scheduled scan didn't find these. Removed these, scanned again and it came back clean.

I'm pretty certain I can get the computer virus free, but My question is how can I configure AVG to keep the PC clean over the long term. Did the virus vault being full cause AVG to stop removing viruses? Why did the full scan find a trojan that the scheduled scan missed. In the virus vault setting I saw it was set to use 10% of the hard drive space, HD is 500 GB, and to delete items older than 30 days, but I saw Items in the vault from several months ago. Also what the heck web sites does this girl visit to get all this stuff .

Thanks

 

[septic]

computer maintenance is kind of like putting gas in a car... it has to be done as much as it is used.

My question is how can I configure AVG to keep the PC clean over the long term.

educate her. As far as the version of AVG, I like to use the latest versions. maybe uninstall and reinstall latest version. Any file sharing sites can have who knows what, et. music and movie sharing. Its good practice anytime downloading a file to scan the file by right clicking file then Scan with.... Firefox with the WOT add-on will help her during her browsing experience. There is never 100% safety.

 

[BestComputerGeek]

Definaltly update to the newest version of AVG. Also check out clamwin which is another free open source virus checker!

 

[Trotter]

As long as the Windows is legit you can install Microsoft Security Essentials. MSE kicks AVG to the curb and is as good or better than the best paid AVs. Seriously. I have it on every computer in my house, and install it on every computer I work on that needs an AV.

I can't endorse it highly enough. And I am by no means a MS fanboy... it just works and is free.