Bye bye Avira after 12 years not without first bursting my PC!

Maegirom

New Member
Thread author
Dec 3, 2020
2
In case it could be useful to someone ... (and sorry for my english)

Hi. I have been using avira for about 12 years. Previously, YES it was a real antivirus. Now it is nothing more than a mountain of bloatware and utilities that I neither need nor want to install and still there they are. Those "speed up your system" utilities always sound more like malware than anything else

The last straw was the obligation to install Opera for the latest update. Up to here, I told myself. Well, I uninstalled it and when I rebooted, blue screen!.

I've wasted 3 days freaking out since I couldn't even get into safe mode. Continuous loop of blue screens when entering windows. In the end, I don't know if by chance or by trying 1000 things I could in. The solution was to disable the windows PRE loading malware check from the failsafe start menu, remove all hard drives except the system one - although I don't know if this had an influence or not - and delete manually from the command prompt (which for 2 days was the only site that allowed me to access) everything related to avira.

I finally got inside. I cleaned registries and even so I still get "avira" entries in regedit and even the "avira browse safety" in the list of installed programs, that there is no way to uninstall it (I get an "OS version incompatibility" message)

IN SUMMARY: Avira has become a source of problems, unwanted software, and on top of that, your system will burst if you try to escape from them. Honestly, it is more like those "fake maintenance" programs that promise to speed up / clean your PC and are ultimately malware.

Wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole anymore. At the moment windows defender does the job.

Greetings.
 

Cortex

Level 26
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Aug 4, 2016
1,465
It's a shame really as it could be a great AV, the last time I tried it there was a launcher which was a real pain, I did persevere for a while but in the end I removed t & imaged back - Maybe with being recently acquired they may tidy the thing up?
 
F

ForgottenSeer 89360

Hi,

I am sorry to hear you had bad experience with Avira, which also matches mine.

Just a small correction, the TuneUP program is not malware - nothing that Avira installs is malicious.
However, it's not effective and it's pretty useless.

The whole Avira package now desperately needs to be reworked in my opinion, as everything feels dated and archaic.
 

Maegirom

New Member
Thread author
Dec 3, 2020
2
Of course I'm not saying that avira IS malware. But that appearance and behaviour that we can see in scam webs and software kind "tune up your system", "speed your boot up", "clean your system" is not confident to me. Everyday was having alerts such as "we've found 27 process you could spped up!", "We've found 356 files you could delete!", "We've found 17 apps to update!" I don't want that in an AV.
I was thinking about get rid of it months ago, the Opera thing was just the detonator.
But all these problems to uninstall it! OMG!
 
F

ForgottenSeer 89360

Of course I'm not saying that avira IS malware. But that appearance and behaviour that we can see in scam webs and software kind "tune up your system", "speed your boot up", "clean your system" is not confident to me. Everyday was having alerts such as "we've found 27 process you could spped up!", "We've found 356 files you could delete!", "We've found 17 apps to update!" I don't want that in an AV.
I was thinking about get rid of it months ago, the Opera thing was just the detonator.
But all these problems to uninstall it! OMG!
Have you tried their manual procedure? Unfortunately, they don't even have an uninstall tool... what a disgrace!
They only have a registry cleaner.
I have compiled a list of removal tools here, where you can see their article: Update - Removal Tools for Common Antivirus Packages
 

MacDefender

Level 16
Verified
Top Poster
Oct 13, 2019
779
Of course I'm not saying that avira IS malware. But that appearance and behaviour that we can see in scam webs and software kind "tune up your system", "speed your boot up", "clean your system" is not confident to me. Everyday was having alerts such as "we've found 27 process you could spped up!", "We've found 356 files you could delete!", "We've found 17 apps to update!" I don't want that in an AV.
I was thinking about get rid of it months ago, the Opera thing was just the detonator.
But all these problems to uninstall it! OMG!
Yeah I hear you. Honestly a lot of AVs are guilty of what I still call adware or at least annoyanceware.

for example Kaspersky Total Security automatically installs a VPN app, Secure Connection, that bothers you at least once and only includes 250MB of data for free.

I recall BitDefender TS also bothers you over the course of a few days about various features as part of its Autopilot feature.

Norton also tries to tell you about their online backup or cloud storage feature.
 
F

ForgottenSeer 89360

Yeah I hear you. Honestly a lot of AVs are guilty of what I still call adware or at least annoyanceware.

for example Kaspersky Total Security automatically installs a VPN app, Secure Connection, that bothers you at least once and only includes 250MB of data for free.

I recall BitDefender TS also bothers you over the course of a few days about various features as part of its Autopilot feature.

Norton also tries to tell you about their online backup or cloud storage feature.
You can turn these annoyances off in Bitdefender and you can uninstall Kaspersky VPN. The problem is Avira has now merged all in one package. Before it was installing every app separately, but now you need to have it all.

As for Norton Cloud Storage, if you are a new user, they must tell you that. You’ve paid for it and you might not know you’ve got it.

You can’t call every notification an annoyance, but pushing unwanted apps and unrequested “secure” browsers, not more secure than Chrome, is definitely annoying.
Many AVs include some small tune-up and clean-up components, as well as updaters, but it’s all one app and these features are just one *.dll file. In Avira case, it’s all different apps.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

fabiobr

Level 12
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Mar 28, 2019
561
Of course I'm not saying that avira IS malware. But that appearance and behaviour that we can see in scam webs and software kind "tune up your system", "speed your boot up", "clean your system" is not confident to me. Everyday was having alerts such as "we've found 27 process you could spped up!", "We've found 356 files you could delete!", "We've found 17 apps to update!" I don't want that in an AV.
I was thinking about get rid of it months ago, the Opera thing was just the detonator.
But all these problems to uninstall it! OMG!
I like Kaspersky cause it does all those things silently (at least on the paid version).

Updates your apps automatically and just notifies you when all are done, as well as vulnerabilities checker.
 

fabiobr

Level 12
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Mar 28, 2019
561
You can turn these annoyances off in Bitdefender and you can uninstall Kaspersky VPN. The problem is Avira has now merged all in one package. Before it was installing every app separately, but now you need to have it all.

As for Norton Cloud Storage, if you are a new user, they must tell you that. You’ve paid for it and you might not know you’ve got it.

You can’t call every notification an annoyance, but pushing unwanted apps and unrequested “secure” browsers, not more secure than Chrome, is definitely annoying.
Many AVs include some small tune-up and clean-up components, as well as updaters, but it’s all one app and these features are just one *.dll file. In Avira case, it’s all different apps.
It's different apps, but last time I tried Avira Prime recently they integrated all of these in one main launcher (that seems like Avast).

And to uninstall there is only Avira Prime there, not a bunch of apps like it was.
 

Azure

Level 28
Verified
Top Poster
Content Creator
Oct 23, 2014
1,712
Yeah I hear you. Honestly a lot of AVs are guilty of what I still call adware or at least annoyanceware.

for example Kaspersky Total Security automatically installs a VPN app, Secure Connection, that bothers you at least once and only includes 250MB of data for free.

I recall BitDefender TS also bothers you over the course of a few days about various features as part of its Autopilot feature.

Norton also tries to tell you about their online backup or cloud storage feature.
I wouldn't mind the Kaspersky VPN much if they at least let me have the option to opt-out from installing it.
 

Nautilus

Level 2
Apr 27, 2020
86
such a shame that more and more " security " products are going down the overbloat alley. Avira used to be one of the best free av's out there in terms of signature based detection years back. same goes for AVG before they got butchered and nutered by Avast! I do hope you have a clean backup image lying around to revert back to....if you feel comfortable enough with defender , there is no need to switch it for something else.
 

Ink

Administrator
Verified
Staff Member
Well-known
Jan 8, 2011
22,361
Now it is nothing more than a mountain of bloatware and utilities that I neither need nor want to install and still there they are. Those "speed up your system" utilities always sound more like malware than anything else
4 years too late.

Avira Connect/Launcher was released in 2016, and only took you until now to realise?

Source: Avira Connect - your free control panel to manage your device | Avira Blog

Stick to Microsoft Defender Antivirus until you find a better Free/Paid Antivirus that you wish to switch to.
 

gery79

Level 12
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Jun 21, 2011
566
what a shame and pity it was a very god peace of software and they brought to the bottom .....well unless Norton wants to bring it back to its glorious days
 

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