V
VanguardLH
badgolferman said:
Sorry, but I don't see that anything was identified in the discussion
so far that pointed to the cause of the NNTP blockage that could help
others. It's just been guesses so far based on a no-longer-existing
setup. You're guessing that installing the Mail Shield with its NNTP
setting would resolve the problem but you didn't test that out. You
guessed, we guessed, but nothing on target for sure.
So what this thread provides is some guesses as to how to prevent the
problem if it occurs again, something you can reference later if you
retry Avast sometime later (but I really don't think you come back to
review this discussion since you may not retry Avast or it will so far
in the future that this discussion won't be applicable or you'll forget
about it).
Alas, I'm one of the Avira users that ended up with a nasty 4-year old
problem. It went away in a major version change so they didn't address
the problem (and claimed they could not reproduce it) and then it came
back in another update. The problem was Avira continually repolling
removable drives once every 60 seconds. This keep floppies issuing
their short groan away every minute when Avira polled them and
prevented USB drives from going into low-power mode. It didn't happen
for lots of users but those it did hit was a constant problem.
The problem stemmed from any process that queried the removable media
device but didn't access its media. Programs that poll the SMART info
from a drive access the interface to the drive but not its media but
Avira didn't differentiate and considered it an access of the media.
Even after the SMART program ceased its polling, like unloading that
program, Avira would continue re-polling the removable drive once per
minute. You had to reboot and without the SMART program to keep Avira
from wearing out the floppy drives and allow USB drives to sleep with
its repeated polling of those drives.
They didn't fix the problem. It went away for awhile and then it came
back. I haven't re-trialed Avira for several months so I don't know if
it "just went away" again. If you don't get hit with this defect then
you'll probably like Avira (once you kill their ads at load and update
time). However, the free version of Avira lacks several features that
are present in the free version of Avast. That is, free Avast has the
missing features that you have to pay to get in Avira - except, I
believe, Avira recently added one of those missing features in the free
version *if* you can tolerate them polluting your web browser with their
toolbar. The free version of Avira now includes the web guard that was
missing before (and present in the free version of Avast) but you have
to get stuck with installing their toolbar in your web browser. See
http://preview.tinyurl.com/64uvxyj. Yuck! No thanks. You get the
toolbar or you don't get their web guard (that free Avast does have).
Then there's the in-your-face attitude Avira has in them shoving their
ads in your face (load-time banner and popup window during updates)
which can be circumvented but require users to take deliberate action.
Avast is adware, too, in that once in a blue moon it'll open a window
to see if they'll lure you into buying their paid version plus their
GUI config screen has their ad at the bottom; however, Avast is far
less obnoxious with their ads than Avira. It was when Avira acquired
AntiVir when the in-your-face ads showed up. I'm not against adware
per se since a LOT of freeware qualifies as adware but it should be
subdued in trying to lure you to their paid product (and I only
tolerate adware that advertises their own products, not other-author
products).