We are making changes to the Panther Tuneup including a price change. The standard tuneup will now include the 2 year professional AVG Antivirus 8.0, a $51 value, in the $130 price. Below are some of the reasons why we are making this change.

Update:

Grisoft has changed its name to AVG USA Inc.  Secondly with the introduction version 8.0 AVG Anti-Malware is AVG Antivirus.  AVG Antivirus includes virus, spyware, rootkit, and the new surf and search shield protections.

First a bit of background:

Grisoft  AVG USA Inc.is the company that created AVG Antivirus that we have been recommending since 2003. They offer AVG Free for home users, but require all other users to pay for the AVG Professional product. In 2006 Grisoft acquired the anti-spyware product called Ewido. Historically, Ewido had a 30 day free with full functionality then it reverted to a feature-limited version. Grisoft has not seen to change in either direction, neither feature-limiting the AVG Free edition, nor ending the limiting of features on the former Ewido, now known as AVG Anti-Spyware.

Since some of the best features of the AVG Anti-Spyware are deactivated after 30 days, the value of protection is not to the level that we would expect to provide with our service. Additionally you are bound to have notifications of the expiration of these features and may be prompted to purchase the full version. As such we have deemed it to be in our mutual best interest to include the professional version in place of the free versions of Grisoft at a deep discount included in the price of the tuneup.

If we consider that about once every year and a half a new major version of AVG products comes out and the free anti-virus requires you to go out and download it again, you will find it potentially less of a hassle to have two years of the professional product with Grisoft support, and no need to download new versions that install automatically during the license period. AVG Anti-Malware is the combination of the two Grisoft products - AVG Anti-virus and Anti-Spyware in one product to provide you maximum protection for your computer.

It is true that Grisoft has other suits, but they include product types that Panther Computers still do not recommend for reasons outlined in other articles on this site - software based firewalls and anti-spam products to be exact. You can still get the Panther Tuneup with the free versions at the old price of $95, however it will not be our standard recommendation from this point forward, nor will it be provided unless you specifically request it. If you have any comments or questions, we welcome your calls and emails.