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I’m a big fan of AVG Free, the cost-less anti-virus software from Grisoft. I’m a keen advocate of it, and have installed it on several computers of friends and relatives (tho’ trying to ensure they keep it up-to-date is a trickier matter). Around this time most users will be seeing dialog boxes appear stating that they should be installing the new version – AVG8. I would agree, as it’s certainly fine software… I have some niggles regarding its installation of unwanted (in my case) web browser addons, but that’s something that’s easily fixed. Not so simple, at least from reading various forums, is killing AVG8 – so I found a way…

When I want to do something processor-intensive, such as game-playing, I tend to kill off any non-required processes and services. For example a few resident utilities I like to run, the firewall, and the anti-virus software. With AVG7 it was simple – I loaded up the superb Process Explorer from Systems Internals and, after doing an “exit/unload” of the AVG system tray icon I would go in and kill the various services. These tended to be the updates manager, the mail checker, and the resident scanner. All useful things to have running, unless you know that the software you’re running is safe (never quite the case, but I’ll let that slide) and need the CPU to do important things such as ragdoll physics of someone comically falling down stairs.

AVG8 won’t let you do that. By default it will restart it’s services whenever you try to kill them. I’ve seen this said in a few forums now, and whether people believe it or not, killing off the anti-virus software will make some software run faster (at least on my old beast of a machine). I have… experience as proof :)

So, with a little hacking I managed to find a way to kill off the AVG8 processes and allow myself to game happily, with only the usual slowdown I get from not upgrading my machine in several years. Here’s how I did it. I don’t make any guarantee’s that this will work for you, but it seems to work for me.

You’ll likely need to have some administrative rights in order to get this working, and I opted to use PsKill, another Systems Internals tool, in order to help with the task. Other than that we simply need a batch file and a registry file, and away we go…

First up the registry file. This is needed because when AVG8 runs it sets up some “failsafe” options in the registry to re-run when it dies. This is the reason that when people kill the AVG8 processes they decide to respawn. The following is a way to reset that “respawning”, and should go into a file called something like “avg_no_restart.reg”:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\avg8wd]

“FailureActions”=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,\
00,00,a8,95,09,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00

Now the batchfile. This is a good old-fashioned DOS-style batch file, mostly as I use Windows 2000, but it should work on other versions of Windows too. This is very simple… it starts by loading the above registry file, which will stop the respawn, then uses PsKill and a “net” command to kill off the AVG8 processes. Enter the following into a file called something like “avg_kill.bat”:

regedit /s avg_no_restart.reg
pskill -t avgtray
pskill -t avgwdsvc
net stop “AVG8 E-mail Scanner”

Then all you need to do is run “avg_kill.bat”. All of the processes associated with AVG8 will die off… except one. For some reason the process “avgrsx”, which is the resident protection, will stick around for about a minute before dying off, but it should go eventually. It does on my system at least. And when you reboot, AVG8 will magically reappear as if nothing was wrong. Marvelous.

And that’s it. If you decide you want to run AVG8 again prior to rebooting your machine, then it’s simple. Just open up a command prompt, or even the Windows “Run…” dialog, and enter the following:

net start “AVG8 WatchDog”

You could even put it into another batchfile, as I have. That would be geeky, eh?

Of course after all of this I should make a disclaimer – this works for me and hasn’t damaged my system that I’m aware of. However, I accept no responsibility for any oddness you may get as a result of doing the above. Be warned that running a system, especially if it’s connected to the internet, without some form of anti-virus software is dangerous. I wouldn’t recommend it. If you decide to do the above I suggest that you regularly perform full scans of your machine, and of course ensure that your virus definitions are up-to-date. Failure to do this is, frankly, stupid.

Disclaimer over. Now go have fun with ragdolls. Uhm… I mean… *cough*.