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Consumer Products => Avast One => Topic started by: ozboomer on March 03, 2022, 04:14:14 AM

Title: Product Feeeedback
Post by: ozboomer on March 03, 2022, 04:14:14 AM
I've been using 'Avast Free Antivirus' (on my Windows 8.1 PC) and 'Avast Mobile Security' (Samsung J5 Pro with Android 9) for a number of years... and seeing I'm expanding the on-line computers I have, I thought I'd get things sorted for a 'real' product and cover all the PCs I have.

I'll omit the gory details.. but the support systems seem to be a bit... 'disorganized'...  and inflexible.

I thought I'd see about an upgrade.. or crossgrade or whatever..  and that was basically too hard.

I had (and reported) order number/registration number for the smartphone under 'Avast Mobile Security' and Support couldn't find it (although Google had no trouble in automatically charging me for another year of subscription).

I couldn't find any record of my 'purchasing' a free product (not unexpectedly) but again, when I quoted the registration number, support couldn't find it... although, their systems have been automatically updating the windows product and 'virus databases' for years.

Fair enough, their 'primary' reference is an Order ID... but you'd think their systems would be flexible enough to locate 'activity' against a registration number (and the other information they collect); we're in 2022, not 1922.

Anyway, I gave up and asked them to close the request for any 'crossgrade', etc as they couldn't find anything... and they persisted in asking me for information I couldn't give them OR that I had already given them.  I think I ended-up dealing with 3 different people who had no idea about their own system/web site (sending me to irrelevant web pages)... and certainly weren't talking to each other.

In desperation, I simply set-up a new (5 devices) subscription for 'Avast One' to cover a couple of PCs and the phone.

I have another request in with support, as the smartphone app has issues.. and the Windows PC version, while it works Ok, seems to delight in dragging my PC to its knees, as AvastSvc.exe and aswidsagent.exe processes are often compute-bound, stealing cycles from other Windows processes.

All this has me questioning what has happened in the last couple of years with the product(s) and the support systems... as the whole 'application suite' seems to have been made much more complex and certainly less friendly and harder to use than it was a few years ago.

I'd been using the phone app and the desktop app with hardly any intervention for years... and as of this year, I've already spent many hours dealing with the products and the support folks and not really getting very far... and the applications themselves are far more intrusive than they used to be.

What the heck happened?