Just Sayin’ More Words

Disabling the AVG 8.0 Free LinkScanner

I use Grisoft’s AVG Free on my home computer for anti-virus. I’ve been using it for a few years and have been pleased with it. It doesn’t have a noticeable performance penalty and it generally stays out of the way. They’ve recently discontinued version 7.5 and have replaced it with 8.0, which is still available for free (although, they’re starting to be more discreet about that).

AVG 8.0 includes a new IE add-on called LinkHelper. When you do a Google search, it checks each link in the results and presents you with some icons indicating whether or not the site listed is safe.

This is great for my mom, but I don’t like to run any unnecessary browser add-ons. IE doesn’t need any help being more unstable. I figured I’d just disable it, but it’s not that straightforward. I went in and disabled it in the AVG options. This got rid of the icons in IE, but now AVG warns you via the tray icon that there’s an error. If I left it like this and there actually was an error, at a glance I wouldn’t know.

Disabling LinkScanner also does not unload the IE addon. So here’s my workaround. Enable LinkScanner in AVG, but then unload the browser addon manually:

AVG still thinks LinkScanner is loaded, but it’s not. You can now search the Googles uninterrupted.

Before anyone responds to this by saying "Switch to Firefox" let me preemptively respond to that. First off, I like Firefox just fine and have nothing against it. The reason I use primarily use IE is because the large majority of the people that use the web sites I build still use IE. If I don’t feel their pain, I find myself ignoring them. Using IE keeps me in touch with my users.