News AVG update kills iTunes

iTunes is slow is it? Hum, not sure about that personally, loads up as quickly as firefox does for me. If you want a slow media player, may i present Windows Media Centre or Center for a American friends.

I've always been abit cautious of AV programs, always used and paid for Trend Micro untill it got so strick with the Firewall it would open ports for C&C Generals/Zero Hour (Start Game and the Allow box thing popped up, Alt Shift to desktop and the pop up disapears) I do use AVG on my NC10, and it's been fine on that, and i use AntiVir on this machine.

Sam

 

Odd. When I installed iTunes it didn't grab all my videos and music. I specifically told it what folders to use, and it left my file associations largely alone. Same with Windows Media Player. A number of people have accused iTunes of being slow. Compared to what? When I click the little icon in my taskbar, it loads right up. And I don't buy the resource claims, either. I usually have it running in the background while I'm working in Photoshop, and I don't notice any performance hits. Really, what do you guys do with all your multiple gigabytes of memory and CPU power anyway?

-monkey

 

The clue is in your sig mate, i7 with 12GB RAM and an SSD...
I have to agree that iTunes is rancid.
Fine for your average joe who couldn't find music files on their PC unless some app like iTunes did it for them, but for anyone with a bit of computer savvy, I think it sucks.
Obviously just my opinion though.

As for false positives, they're just gonna get more and more frequent.
All the AV scanners do is search for patterns (aka definitions) in files.
The more definitions you add and the more files you have on your system, the greater the chances of there being a coincidental overlap of definition and innocent file.

I think what someone said earlier is right.
False positives in smething you can reinstall easily is fine.
When it takes out system files and renders a system unbootable, that's just poor testing.

 

Indeed you make a good point. But did you stop to think that Apple software just pulled the same hack in their software that a virus uses? If the file pattern is the same the instructions are the same. That's funny. I wonder what were the specific instructions that got flagged?

 

YOUR DOING IT WRONG

 

+1

I use both the Windows and OS X versions.

 

I don't think it works like that dicobolt.
I don't think scanners can see the specific instructions that were in a snippet of code.
The source code is compiled and I think a signature is just a long pattern of 1s and 0s.
iTunes just happened to have the identical string in their compiled code.

At least, that's how I understand it.
Not sure how heuristics etc comes into it...

No, YOU'RE doing it wrong...

 

Whenever someone I know has a computer issue, the first thing I ask is "do you use AVG?" If the answer is yes, I tell them to uninstall it and get Avast. 75% of the time, this fixes it. AVG doesn't test anything and their software is horrible, it interferes with tons of popular programs, particularly media programs, it really doesn't seem to like media programs.

Never had a single problem with Avast, ever. And I'm not sure I've even heard of problems.

 

I've been sick of AVG's resource hogging for a long time now, and I'm going to replace it with Avast! soon.

 

++1

Run iTunes on vista and XP never had any problems what so ever, I point it to my music directory, select the file types I want it to pick up and job done , no slow down and no hassle.
And I'm a self confessed apple hater.

 

you'd be better off with Avira

 

i must say that i hate itunes! its rubbish! i just set it up now days to put everything thats in the libary onto my ipod automaticaly so i dont have to use the bloody software! i have used AVG for years and found it one of the best anti virus's ever! and i wont change! the firewall is realy impressive too! but on that note tho it can be slow at scanning the entire system and can eat alot of ram but i would rather that and know that everything has been scanned, so i scan it when im at work over night! least i can get home to a nice none virus infected machine! once i find a better bit of kit to put my music on my ipod then for now i will leave it to it! any sugestions would be grateful!

 

Me too. As a long time AVG user, I have been happy with it in the past, but this latest version has been the last straw. Not to mention the painful pop-ups I have been getting lately urging me to "upgrade" to the paid version. Where is the option to turn them off? You're being a pain in my arse AVG!

I'm running the Windows 7 RC, can anyone give me recommendations about a new AV I can use across Windows 7 and XP? I've been looking at Avast, but I can be persuaded by something better.

And no, Linux isn't a solution to Windows viruses! I'm already a convert.

 

itunes is a piece of crud on windows while it's perfectly usable on Mac. If you don't have it running in the background it takes ages to start up.

 

Those 1's and 0's are executed code because the files flagged (iTunes.dll and iTunesRegistry.dll) have executable instructions because they are dll's. DLL's are nothing but software objects/functions rolled up into a library to keep access organized and under control. So those 1's and 0's from those apple DLL's were executed. Enough of the the 1's and 0's are the same in the virus and in those iTunes DLL's that's why it gave a false positive and matched whatever method of hashing AVG's uses in their software. AVG just needed to check a longer range of data to prevent a false positive. Fact remains the instructions for the virus and for iTunes are partially the same. Probably just harmless portion code but it's still funny that virus writers and iTunes developers come up with the same machine level code.

 

Or the compiler does.

 

Apple software is spam anyway. Ever try to install quicktime and then get a update screen every hour to install update including itunes and safari. If you disable that options and close the updater window it comes back a hour later with all options checked again.

Same with Adobe's acrobat reader every time it wants to install a 130mb acrobat update. 130mb for a simple pdf reader wtf? Glad I uninstalled it and downloaded the incredible fast and small Foxit reader!

 

iTunes sucks big time. It brings my missus' Laptop to it's knees..... begging for submission..... or extra cpu cycles, it doesn't care. OK so it's not the fastest laptop in the world but come on.... it's a frickin tool for organising audio libraries..... it shouldn't be so ****

 

Best response I've seen:
"Maybe Palm have a stake in AVG?"

 

Far too many Skype windows, and Sandbox2 is quite the resource hog. Photoshop has, more than once, topped 4gb of RAM on me.

When I'm trying to work on a map or in PS, I don't tend to want a media player hanging over my work area because I asked it to go 'next' on shuffle. No supposedly 'good' media player should crap itself at shuffling 50k+ tracks. Foobar certainly doesn't. If I open iTunes I can open Sandbox2 and load a map before iTunes is ready to use. If I open foobar, then it's ready to use inside of thirty seconds.

Call me picky, if you want, but I like my media player to do just that, play media, not hang and ask me to install Safari every time it thinks it needs an update.

I wish I could uninstall Quicktime, but no. Now iTunes forces it on you :/