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Friday, April 29, 2011

Design for only the computer illiterates - AVG Downloads

If you are a developer of download manager and installer of AVG or others, please do not simply develop your download page to cater for the computer illiterates by forcing your users to use the download manager. I know many people will not have any idea which one to download - 32-bit version or the 64-bit.

But there are plenty of people out there that are very competent probably more so than you that can distinguish a 32-bit environment verse 64-bit one. Forcing everyone to use a download manager also is wasting bandwidth. Many people have several machines and it seems totally illogical to have each machine downloading the same thing because your download manager is so dumb that do not even offer the user a chance to save the file.

You should also need to cater for those power users.

Adobe Flash used to be notorious in hiding the place where one can download the stand alone installer but lately it has a change of heart and ditching the annoying download manager. This is much appreciated and a lesson AVG should learn.

In fact, I find AVG so annoying that I have been looking for programs that supply their users full installer for download and one such program is Avast. Indeed I have replaced AVG on several of my machines (real and virtual) with Avast and finding that a refreshingly good nimble no-nonsense replacement of a lumbering monster.

It seems with each new version AVG has gone backwards by a few steps. Now it is draconian attitude in forcing users to use their download manager. What next. Time for a serious rethink of using AVG.

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