Recently Avast tried to update itself and it kept telling me something else needed to finish installing, to reboot and then to finish the installation. I did that several times. When I clicked the desktop icon it would tell me firewall is turned off. Then it was blocking my own website mails due to certificate issues even when I told it to exclude the server from blocking, so I called tech support.
First I would like to note that the background noise was so loud that I could barely think what to say and had to hold the ear part away from my ear when talking. Hearing was very difficult.
At any rate when I told the support tech what the problem was he said to click the resolve button and when I did and nothing happened he said this is definitely an issue that has to be gone through little step by step because it was for sure that something bad had gotten into my computer like a malware or similar problem and then proceeded to tell me I could pay 119 dollars for a short term help or 179 dollars for a year.
I am a woman if this matters, but it shouldn't and when I told him no I would try to fix it first he acted like I was an idiot. He said none of my programs could find these issues. How did he know that if he is not aware of either my skills or my software for starters. Then he asked how do you remove a DLL and I said it depends, it might be from the register. (Actually I was having so much of a hard time listening that I couldn't think of the answer.) He said no see you don't know how to fix it if you don't know how to remove a DLL and continued to try to sell me the tech support.
I told him I had access to that information and that at any rate I would try to fix things before I would buy tech support. This whole conversation was difficult due to noise in the background. It sounded like a party going on there was so much loud talking and laughing.
I hung up. I found that the attempt to auto install the update had put a second copy of Avast on my system. I uninstalled that, left the original copy, updated the original copy and all was well after a restart!
I feel sorry for people who might call and actually trust your tech support not to at least ask a few sensible questions before just trying to sell advanced tech help.
Just thought you need to know. This is a very discouraging experience for me considering my future use of the product. I have pro - not the free version.
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