Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Security Essentials launch last week, AVG Technologies is unveiling a major update to its free and paid internet security products which the company claims brings much faster scan times as well as a number of under-the-hood improvements.

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Competition is a good thing. And since they have the link scanner (plus or minus), it does give them a feature over Ms product.

IE 7 and IE 8 have phishing protection (aka LinkScanner) built-in. So if you are using IE 7 or IE 8 you really are not gaining much, if anything, by using AVG LinkScanner.

I wonder if we're at the point where we're whitelisting instead of blacklisting application signatures? I've read before that there would soon be a turning point where it would be less resource intensive if we check signatures for software that's supposed to be on the computer, as opposed to the previously checking for virus/spyware/rootkit/malware signatures of files that shouldn't be on your computer.

This is not correct. LinkScanner is not just some anti-phishing tool, it can detect drive-by-downloads and new 0-day malware by detecting exploits that are used to deliver this malware. So definitely not the same as IE7 or IE8 features, these are much simpler and far behind 0-days

Whitelisting by itself is not sufficient and can work only in enterprise (very rigid) environments. But AVG9 also uses a bit of white-listing technology to significantly speed up on-demand scan, using results for files that can be trusted

AVG is bloated. I now use and recommend Avira.

that's kind of the point of the story wind, they claim they have cut the bloat.

I used AVG for years but recently switched to Avast which works better for me at least and a lot of others are migrating away from AVG as well.

I subscribed at one point with AVG & found it to be very revealing when they released AVG 8.0 free but still kept paying customers on the 7.5 version for months. In the end though, even 7.5 got bloated & having to wait about 5 minutes for it to update at every boot & for the system to be finally usable was too much.

Switched to Avast & even though it also has flaws, I haven't never looked back.

AVG lol "AVAST" one of the best of the best in my books