Yesterday, I was over at my grandma's place to help set up her Christmas tree, and while I was there, she asked me for help with her printer, which wasn't working. So she turned on her PC and tried to bring up the web page she was trying to print... and the PC hung for at least ten seconds before responding to anything — even single keystrokes. All the while, the hard drive was grinding away. Something was obviously wrong.

After waiting, like, five minutes for Task Manager to open, I managed to figure out that AVG Antivirus was completely choking the system while updating. So I opened up AVG's control panel, which took another few minutes, and got to its update tab. Now, by this point, it had been at least twenty minutes since booting the PC and the update progress bar was only about 3/4 full. Clicked cancel... and waited a good ten minutes for it to happen.

So then I could finally do stuff at only painfully slow speeds instead of excruciatingly want-to-throw-the-computer-out-the-window slow speeds. This was still unacceptable, so I headed to the Windows control panel to uninstall AVG. The thing was crippling the PC as bad as any virus, so why not? That ended up taking another fifteen or so minutes, but eventually that bloated piece of ass was purged from the system.

Before rebooting to complete the uninstallation, though, I went into the system settings and there I found the reason AVG was choking it so incredibly bad: It was a 1.7 GHz Celeron with only 384 MB of RAM and ~500 MB of HDD space allocated for virtual memory. I bumped the virtual memory up to 2 GB and rebooted. Finally, the PC was running smoothly. Still slow, given the slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM, but smoothly.

I went and started downloading Avira Antivirus to replace AVG while we tried to get the printer to work. No dice on that, since I think the printer's shot and would need physical repairs of some kind, but I got Avira installed. Incidentally, Avira installed, updated, and ran a quick system scan in less time than it took AVG to uninstall, and the system remained usable all the while. Some of that improvement was due to more virtual memory, I'm sure, but still...

tl;dr AVG sucks, especially on low end PCs.