Since starting the new job and getting an HP 6710b laptop with Vista pre-installed, the first thing after having Vista properly configured, was shrinking that partition right down and installing Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. But every so now and again I boot into Vista to do something. And not liking the idea of being forced to pay for a piece of software by a bunch of software delinquents and/or terrorists (Dumbass virus and worm writers/script kiddies), I run the free version of AVG anti-virus, written by Grisoft. I’ve not had a single problem with them ever (even on my home PC), and not a single virus has passed my way (That AVG or I know of, anyway…).

So surprise for me this morning, when, straight after an auto-update of the virus definitions on the laptop, I get this popup, advertising their “new” Internet Security Suite.

This just caught me by surprise, as I’ve never seen this with AVG before, and it’s probably buried somewhere in their terms and conditions that they can do this.

On the one hand I feel it’s a bit cheeky to do such blatant popup spam, which is something one would expect your typical adware/malware app to do. On the other hand though, I feel Grisoft is quite within their right to advertise their paid-for products to those of us that make use of their free products. I mean, their software is saving probably millions of people lots of time and money by protecting their Windows PCs from viruses. I’m still a bit undecided if I should just shrug it off as “OK”, or to be upset about. I’m leaning towards the former.