Rob’s Blog

Over the weekend AVG pushed out an update to their client. This update breaks Windows 7 by causing a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) after 3 – 5 minutes of using the machine. While I haven’t done extensive research on the issue, removing AVG seems to have fixed the problem. During the uninstall I got the BSoD error, which caused the process to be incomplete. Luckily it removes enough of AVG to have it show disabled when the PC is rebooted. Running the uninstall again makes sure it’s completely out of the system. I’m hoping AVG gets this problem fixed ASAP so I can re-install their virus protection on my PC. After recently having to fix Kaspersky’s BSoD on my system, I really hope I don’t have to install Norton by default.

More to come!

UPDATE: Looks like this issue isn’t only related to AVG.

So I have found the solution to the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and it had nothing to do with nVidia’s Windows 7 pre-release driver. When I first installed Windows 7, it notified me that I had no anti-virus software (obviously) and listed three recommendations, one of which was free: Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows 7 technical preview. I’ve heard many good things about Kaspersky and decided to give it a try.

Kaspersky Lab releases technical preview of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows 7

After installing it seemed like it was working OK, but after a while it would generate a BSOD with the error pointing to kl1.sys. A quick Google search revealed that this file belongs to Kaspersky AV. I uninstalled it, installed AVG Free and I’ve been error-free since.

Now Windows 7 is running completely stable and fast. For being a beta release it runs pretty much like an RC, except for the recent MP3 corruption hotfixed they pushed out yesterday. Great job so far, Microsoft.