I upgraded from Win7 to Win10 on 28 July, just a day before the offer ended, hoping that by then any compatibitily bugs would have been sorted. Checked that Avast program was up to date, along with everything else. The following day Avast offered the update to the current version 12.2.2276 which I installed and all seemed fine.
On 10 Aug I installed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. A big mistake not to have waited for the compatibility bugs to be ironed out...
Apart from Windows reverting to standard privacy settings instead of everything being turned off as I had set during the previous upgrade, everything seemed fine for a while.
Then I get Avast popup showing a file reputation warning. Four warnings on top of each other. The warning said that the file had not been seen by many people, and it appeared to be from what looked like a Windows Update location. Avast said that it had no signature.
After declining the 4 popups (connection rejected), they reappeared maybe half an hour later. In the meantime I'd checked that Avast was still up to date, and looked for this forum. I still can't find a link to this forum from within Avast, and a google search seemed to indicate it was no longer available having been hacked some time ago. Using the correct URL just gave an error message indicating the page didn't exist. (Perhaps it was down for maintenance, with no warning page?)
I decided to phone Avast to query why a Windows Update file was showing unsigned and failing the reputation test.
I looked in the program and called an 0203 number in the UK and it was answered by someone with an American accent. After some discussion he asked me to install the BomGar remote control program, so that he could seem my screen and read the warning that I was seeing.
He said that it was definitely not from Windows, as it wasn't a Windows Update location.
He then ran a program to check for problems, which said that I had more than one antivirus program running. I assumed this meant the Windows Defender built into Windows 10 wasn't disabled properly.
He also said my Virus Chest in Avast had lots of old things in it, and they should all have been automatically purged after 30 days.
Also there were some files on my computer that were locked and unable to be scanned. He said this was likely to be caused by a virus, and that my system was full of viruses. Also that Avast wasn't up to date, and therefore not updating itself properly. Apparently being prevented by the virus.
I was then persuaded reluctantly to part with £129.99 for Avast Total Support. Remember, I had called to report that Avast had a bug.
Half an hour later BomGar connected me to another person - an American lady, who was very helpful. She had a look around and verified that Avast was showing fully updated, so she did a repair installation (as I could have done if the first-line agent had suggested it, or as I would have read about if the forum had been working...)
This seemed to stop the warning popups, which were apparently from the correct Windows Update location. She didn't offer any explanation about why Avast was saying they were unsigned, or why anything from Microsoft Update would rely on reputation testing...
She then ran the HitmanPro scanner (free for first use) which did flag up a couple of items of malware. A trojan in a spell checker for OE, that I had only downloaded in order to scan it for viruses, and had never run on my Windows 7 machine that doesn't have Outlook Express. That file was from 2012, and the other dodgy one was even earlier and may have been copied from my previous WinXP machine. The copying would have been scanned by Avast, and again I'm fairly sure it had never run on this machine.
She then used MalwareBytes junk file scanner (also free) to remove a huge number of thumbnail files from my huge collection of photos.
My machine is now running marginally faster, though Google Chrome still keeps pausing and saying "not responding" and this had sometimes been happening on the BomGar program too. Defraggler reports that after a defrag my drive speed is just over 2Mbps. A lot of files still can't be defragged by Defraggler, although Windows reports the drive as 0% fragmented.
I'm puzzled by various things - why use BomGar when Avast has remote access built in? (or would that have been vulnerable to the repair installation of Avast?)
Why was BomGar unable to survive a reboot, and required the lady to phone me again from the States to ask me to reconnect her? She had seen that TeamViewer was installed on my machine and I know that can survive reboots.
Why does Avast Total Support not include anything of the Avast suite?
HitmanPro is a purely heuristic scanner so I'd expect a few false positives. The agent didn't send the malware to Avast to be checked as to why Avast failed to detect it.
My Virus Chest still has very old stuff in it. Was the Anniversary Update at 3GB too big for it?
So, did I get ripped off by a first-line agent who didn't know that Avast had a problem with the Anniversary Update, or did I get good value from someone using free software to spend half a day fixing my machine?
