On my main desktop and my laptop I use Grisoft‘s commercial anti-virus product AVG SoHo Edition. On my video capture box I use the very popular AVG Free Edition, a stripped down version without support. (If you don’t have anti-virus software on any of your Windows systems, take a moment to download the AVG Free Edition now.) I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. I’m pretty careful about opening email, but other people also use my computer and occasionally they will not be so careful.
Today I got a popup that a file had been identified as infected by a trojan PSW.Banker.ASO. I opened up the Virus Vault and found that a total of nine files had been detected as that same trojan horse over the past 12 hours. Looking into it some more, I became suspicious that there was any actual infection. The supposedly infected files were all legitimate existing files of various sizes, and there were no other symptoms of this type of infection present. Also, the file was pronounced clean by ClamAV.
Since this was on a system with support, I sent off a technical support request to Grisoft. They promise that they have support available 24/7, but I’ve heard that before and still had to wait a day or two for response. To my surprise, 35 minutes later a response came back from a support person. And to my further astonishment, he didn’t suggest stupid things like rebooting my computer or clearing my browser cache. He actually said they had found the problem. And to completely flabbergast me, he went on to say that they had pushed out a new update to fix the problem. All I had to do was hit the update button on the software (or wait a few hours for it to automatically be picked up) and the problem was solved!
THIRTY FIVE MINUTES!
That’s some seriously excellent customer service. Next time you need to buy anti-virus software, consider Grisoft.
Wow. That is support.
I’ve been using Avast myself – I think I’ll give Gri a whirl though.
Speaking of customer service, Samsung is another company that’s up there (at least for me).
My 210T stopped working about a year ago. I never sent in the warranty or anything, but called support anyway to see what they could do. After trying a few troubleshooting things, they just flat-out offered to exchange it for a new one.
I was kinda like “great, I have to mail it,” but turns out they have a deal with UPS stores. They mail a new replacement to your local UPS store, you go and swap out your defective one for the new one, and that’s it. Done, finished.
They guaranteed me that I could do this for as long as I owned the monitor. Now THAT’S service. Needless to say, I try to buy Samsung LCDs whenever possible now.
(http://livejournal.com/users/edpark)
Not to mention that Samsung has some of the best LCDs in terms of performance and picture quality. Too bad they are hard to find in Taiwan.
(http://livejournal.com/users/jlick)