The suggestions offered – buy a license, uninstall and re-install Avast etc were just not Ok. Google did not reveal any simple fixes – Avast’s community forum had help! Avast Internet Security trial expired, no internet connection and Avast Internet Security Trial seems to have affected my internet connection. Opened Avast! gui and there are no panels for turning the thing off… Its reverted back to the free version – but has killed my net connection in the process! Not a happy camper at this point – still wasn’t worried since I figured there’ve got to be tons of users with the same problem and it probably has a simple fix. So up comes device manager and under Network Devices I see a whole lot of ‘avast! NDIS filter’ virtual devices showing up. Turns out that the WIFI just wouldnt connect.

This morning I finally sat down to see what was up. I offered that up as a solution and a few hours later am told that it hasn’t fixed the issue. Now my wifi dongle on the home pc does once in a while show up with a ‘Limited connection’ that’s quickly fixed with either disabling and enabling the dongle or unplugging it and putting it back in the USB port. Remembering the notices about the trial expiring and reverting back to the free version, I chose to ignore all the warnings till yesterday afternoon when the wife called me up at work about ‘internet not working from the home machine’. The good thing about the internet security product was that it was discreet – in fact, safe to say that I even forgot that I installed it.

About a fortnight ago, I started getting warnings about ‘your trial licenses is about to expire’ and so on.

Not much of an option and you can’t blame them for trying to push their products and convert free users to paying ones – so I went ahead with the upgrade. Avira’s update process said I could revert back to the free Antivirus version anytime without a re-install or a re-anything! Now I had no need for this (I use COMODO firewall which has been quite good) however, there was no way around it. Some months ago (or maybe was it a year ago?) there was a program update and it wanted me to install ‘Avira Internet Security’. It’s been mostly good though I’ve had some reservations about it – namely, nag pop-ups and so on. So I use ‘free for personal use’ Avast Antivirus at home for the past couple of years.

%1!s! update service (avast)