tanker wrote:
I provide advice to my fellow seniors about computer secrity issues. Up to now I have recommended your product aboove all others. I am now reassessing this because:
-although the liklihood of false positives cannot be completely eliminated, they do represent a special problem for users who are PC-unsophisticated because they may cause unecessessary alarm and panic
-accordingly, your response regarding false positive queries should be timely and complete.
Yours was neither. You took too long to fix it, you did not acknowledge my assistance in the matter with a reply, nor have you answered my question (was it a false positive?).
I can understand your concern, however just to give you a little history as far as my past experiences in regards to your post.
I'm sure you are well aware of a couple of AV programs by the name of Mcaffe and Norton. To make a long story short after using Mcaffe for about 2 years I switched Norton because Mcaffe missed a virus which destroyed my Operating System (OS) and all my data files.
I suppose one way to look at my experience with Mcaffe is that
while I never did get any "false positives" those 2 years I think maybe I would rather have put up with a "false positive" now and then and saved my OS and files.
Now to Norton, when I installed the NAV2004 (which they forced me to do as they refused to support my NAV2002 any further) I had a couple of issues with Dial-up Windows popping up at innappropriate times (always at boot up and shut down). I sent numerous emails to Norton Support which were often misconstrued and resulted in getting unrelated answers to my inquiries. In the end Support was ultimately unable to address my problem so I finally had to shut down "Auto Update" to get rid of the launch of my Dial-up Window at intermitant times and boot up. I
never did get rid of the Dial-up Window launch at shut down until I finally uninstalled Norton AV all together.
Moral of this story is while it took somtimes weeks to get a responce to my emails to Norton Support they were never able to address my problems in the end.
In conclusion, certainly Avast! may have issues from time to time (just as all computer software will at times) I can say that
this forum was a very
big factor in making my decision to go with Avast, besides the fact that I feel that Avast is likely at least as good if not better than most AV programs on the market and actually offers a considerable lattitude in choices as far as protection is concerned as compared to others. One other huge factor is the
frequency with which the Virus signature DB is updated with Avast which very often is daily. This is a huge contrast to Norton who made updates available approximately very 10-14 days is perhaps the biggest reason Avast is my choice.