Well, it was worth a shot, and I did say not all might apply.

I've used the free version of AVG for years now, and have no complaints as it has done its job when required, and I just forget it's there and it all works completely automatically every day. It even downloads its own updates and new anti-virus files every day.

Apart from being free, the biggest recommendation for this is that it's home is Czechoslovakia - need I say more?

You're in luck, as the newest version AVG Anti-Virus Free 8.0 just hit the net a few days ago, and I'll be upgrading from 7.5 tonight.

Go get it from...

http://free.grisoft.com/

Where you'll also find a FAQ for instructions and information, and there also downloadable documentation.

While I may be a bit more savvy than most, I've never even looked at the documentation - just downloaded the file, ran it, and then played about with the setting until it worked the way I wanted and I could forget about it.

I know it's obvious, but just in case, Version 8 is the one to go for - 7.5 is history now.

AVG8 went in fine, and nothing naughty reported (yet).

The registration failed - whether that's because I already had version 7 registered I don't know, but it hasn't caused any problems. Maybe a clean install rather than upgrade will be different - obviously not something I can try!

One point worth making for a new user...

Once the initial install is complete, you will be advised to run the update option - do this.

It will immediately connect to the AVG site, download and install the newest version of the program and all the virus detection files after a few minutes.

Once you have played with it and found the 'Scheduler' you will find it defaults to a scan every day at 12:00 - providing the PC is on of course. I've never had any real problems, and eventually set this to happen only on one day per week. In reality, I finally set it to manual scan, and just run it if I think there is something amiss - never is though.

It's always running in the background and checking programs, downloads, email etc and will FLASH UP a bug on screen,  and alert as soon as you touch any of these that it thinks there is problem with, and let you decide what should be done next.

The Captain's not the only with oddities on his PC.

For over a year now, I've been driven up the wall at startup (or worse still, reboot) times, ever since my PC decided to spend somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes grinding and grating the hard drive every time this was done.

The thing is useless while this is going on, as anything started would have to be read from the hard drive, and that was busy doing its own thing, so if anything could be persuaded to start, it just crawled along, probably slowing things down even more.

Despite launching all sorts of investigative and reporting programs to see what was happening at startup, nothing odd was ever seen or reported, and I just gave up.

A chance posting on another forum provided the answer, and after months of pointless searching learned that I couldn't find anything wrong because... nothing was wrong.

Although I never use it, Windows has always had a scheduler built in. Usually I delete or disable it, but found that it had become configured to run a hard disk test at every startup - certainly not by me is all I can say. I can only guess it was called up as part of some some installation way back in the mists of time, and the code was either badly written, and didn't delete the task once it was completed, or more likely, the computer crashed, and that part of the process was never completed.

Either way, the scheduler has been killed now, and I now I get use my PC a few minutes after starting it, which is a new luxury

Maybe they'll put programs in memory some day, and we can go back to the good old bad old days of computing, when you turned on your primitive box with a few kb of memory, and started using it within a few seconds

I'm glad to hear it...

I think we'd all be gladder if we knew why...

But then again, we don't want to make fuss either, just in case...

I wonder if the Favourites route was the cause of your problem.  Did it contain and out of date or corrupted url?  I always type www.sec and click on the bar underneath with the full url I want.  

That's a distinct possibility - the earliest urls before the domain was fully established did not have www at the beginning. If that version is used, it will get you to the site, but bits will be broken.

In future, it might be worth mentioning the route used to get to the site if there are any more problems like this.

As far as I know, all the links have been revised over time, but that doesn't mean there are old ones I've forgotten about that are buried away in dark corner, and of course, I can't do anything about people's personal bookmarked links or favourites. They have to check them themselves every so often, in case there have been changes.