hexadecimal

If you receive “General Error” when trying to perform updates in AVG antivirus after installing it on Windows Vista or Windows 7, it’s most likely due to not having installed it as Administrator.

I installed the Free edition of AVG antivirus on my Windows 7 computer, and received some strange behavior from the updater. The antivirus was running, just not updating. Whenever I tried a manual update, the update component would fail with the ever so descriptive error message “General Error”.

After scratching my head for a bit, I came up with this simple solution:

Download the newest version from free.avg.com and right click the installer (something like avg_free_stf_en_8_237a1428.exe), and click “Run as Administrator”. Then, when prompted, simply select repair, and the installer will update the registry keys that it could not during the previous installation, and voila, everything works!

Although AVG is a very good antivirus engine, and has been for quite some time (on top of being free!), their installer is the typical product of geeks making software for geeks. They simply don’t account for normal users not realizing that software such as Antivirus products, might actually need to do some low-level plumbing during the installation, let alone that such operations require full Administrator privileges.

Please leave a comment and let me know if this was/was’t helpful to you!