Hello, I hope this is the right subforum for my question... I couldn't find any other that seemed to fit.

I've been using AVG antivirus 7.5 on my Windows XP and Vista machines, and on the XP machine I also have spywareblaster and spywareguard

But as of 6-1-2008, virus updates for AVG are no longer available unless I upgrade to 8.0. I just did so, and found out you can still get AVG antivirus for free, if it's for home use (which it is, in my case). It looks different though. Now AVG screen now says (under 8.0):

antivirus: active
anti-spyware: active
email scanner: active
License: active
Link scanner: active
Resident shield: active
Update manager: active

To me this sounds like I don't need spyware guard or spywareblaster anymore, so I uninstalled those. Am I inferring correctly from my AVG screen that 8.0 now comes with spyware protection, whereas 7.5 did not?

This post has been edited by Thromble: Jun 7 2008, 05:17 PM

AVG previous to version 8.0 of their Antivirus also offered a program called AVG Anti-spyware. AVG Anti-spyware was previously known as Ewido. It's a pretty good anti spyware scanner.

There are some problems with AVG 8.0 though. If you use the immunize features in programs like Spybot S&D, or Spywareblaster, AVG will return false positives on certain registry entries it uses to block certain threats. Because of this I only do manual scans with AVG until they fix those false positives.

I haven't use SpywareGuard in a long time so I can't really tell you how it stacks up against other programs with real time protection.

AVG WILL NOT make SpywareBlaster obsolete. Keep that one around. And use the immunize feature from Spybot S&D while you're at it as they compliment each other well. However be warned that AVG will detect "ActiveX Compatibility" registry keys as false positives. Make sure to ignore those and don't let AVG try to "fix" them if you want to keep your immunizations.