[gui-talk] Is AVG Free Edition v. 7.5 being obsolesced by a free v. 8?

[Joel Deutsch]

On the JFW and Blind Tech lists, a number of people have been going back and 
forth about how to find, download and cope with what they vaguely refer to 
as AVG version 8. It seems that a relatively few stalwart Jaws jockeys have 
figured out how to use it with the Jaws cursor and a bunch of workarounds, 
but the general consensus among the non-clever seems to be that it's not 
what they want to hassle with.

Meantime, my AVG Free Edition keeps on being updated daily, works okay when 
I manually run a scan every few days, and has never displayed an update 
notice and invitation to upgrade. Ever.  And believe me, some of my programs 
are not shy about that; every so often, Winamp presents an update dialogue 
when it launches, a dialogue I can't touch with Jaws and which blocks my 
access to the player's controls.

I Curious to learn more,I went to the appropriate Grisoft page for the free 
download of AVG, but the text around the download link doesn't say which 
version the free version currently is. And then there's some promotional 
information about Version 8, but I swear they refer to it as a security 
suite, not just the simple antivirus program that's all I have and all I 
want. And there's a table there that seems to indicate that they want $35 
for the personal version and $55 for the company one. So how is this a 
replacement for mine? But the mailing list people keep talking about this 
stuff , and I just can't figure out what's happening from reading the 
messages in these threads.

I asked about this on JFW, and no one has replied. And I don't want to ask 
on Blind Tech, because instead of a congenial, informative response from 
someone who knows, the first reply will be from a certain person who feels 
it incumbent upon him to lecture me about how I must not be a disciplined 
Jaws user or I would know that you use this command to do this, and you 
refer to this page element by that name, and how all blind computer users 
must learn to avail themselves of tutorial material and learn the rudiments 
of Windows and Jaws, yadda yadda. I'm serious. This person does this stuff, 
this pedagogical pontificating, at the drop of a hat. So I can't write my 
inquiry freely, as I've done here, and expect a friendly, straightforward 
reply without overexplanation (another thing he always does) and a lecture. 
I wrote him privately once and asked why he does this, and he said that he 
knows that I may understand more than that about how to use my computer, 
Windows, and Jaws, but he feels a responsibility to use every list question 
as an opportunity to educate everyone, etc.

Sorry to vent like this, but it's infuriating and frustrating. Because Blind 
Tech has the advantage of being high traffic and having a fair number of 
sober, well informed subscribers, and so I feel badly about having to avoid 
it. Oh, well.

So , does anybody know what's up with AVG and its free editions? Am I okay 
standing pat, so long as AVG doesn't send me a notice saying they won't be 
updating the definitions for v. 7.5 anymore?

thanks, all. Again, sorry for the rant. Please indulge me this one time. 
Thanks a lot.