After a recommendation on page 168 of the January 2004 issue of PC World magazine, I decided to try Avast 4. So on Thursday, December 18, 2003, I downloaded the home edition of Avast 4 and installed it on my home computer running Windows ME, Outlook Express and Juno for email, Internet Explorer and Opera for web browsing. If it worked well, I wanted to consider its use in a small business that I support. But immediately after installation my Outlook Express email quit working. A popup screen with a strange username kept asking for a password. I had no idea what it wanted. Furthermore, my system has been working for months and I didn’t remember what my email password was, if that is what it wanted. Finally, I found a FAQ which said to restore the mail servers to default if Avast4 didn’t work. But I didn’t know what these defaults were since I had set them months ago and Avast4 had now overwritten them. Why doesn’t Avast4 have an option to return the defaults to their original values? Furthermore, when I tried to turn off email checking, I got a message that asked if I wanted these values to “PERSIST.” This doesn’t make a lot of sense in American English and the term is not generally used in computer jargon, so I wasn’t quite sure what to say. In any event, I finally got email working again after talking to technical support at my Internet Service Provider. Juno continued to work throughout all this hassle so I knew that the hardware and the rest of the system were probably OK.
Then Internet Explorer and Opera both quit accessing my Yahoo account. I don’t know why, but I finally removed Avast4 entirely from my system and now everything works again. Needless to say, I don’t think Avast4 is a program that can be trusted. While I appreciate the efforts of the authors, and especially making it available for free download, I won’t be using it and I wouldn’t recommend it to friends.
