I previously purchased AVG AV and VPN and installed it on my 2015 Mac, running the most recent version of OS Catalina (The Sequoia OS is not compatible due to age of my system. That said they are still releasing security patches etc for Catalina.). Anyhow the AVG apps (prob the AV) bogged my system down so I made the decision to get ride of both the AV and the VPN. I did in fact use their “uninstall” app to remove it but if you search for AVG files there were tons left behind… especially in the registry (this is what I was told with apple’s tech support). A quick google search shows I’m not alone and it appears to be a common issue with AVG AV and VPN. It took SEVERAL hourS long callS to AVG and then purchasing a 3rd party software to find and kill the remaining files. I was pissed! I’m now rethinking things and would prefer to have a VPN installed, which finally leads me to my questions…
Is this the case with all VPNs paired with Macs or is this more of an “AVG sucks in general” type of issue? In other words am I at risk of encountering this issue with any AV and VPN software on a Mac of is this specific to the AV and VPN i selected?
Also if anyone has a VPN recommendation, that specifically works well with Macs I’d love to hear it (not interested in AV software). It’s impossible to tell which vpns are good/bad bc every review I find appears to be sponsored so I’d especially love to hear from anyone that has first hand experience with Macs and some of the widely available VPNs.
3rd party antivirus is terrible and generally unnecessary except for the very technically illiterate, if you want something like that use malwarebytes and just do a free scan every now and again, for VPNs choose a VPN only provider like PIA or Mullvad or the like
NordVPN from the App Store works well. NordVPN downloaded from their web site is more complicated to uninstall.
There are a couple of issues you may encounter with apps that work at a low level in macOS:
The normal uninstall by dragging the main app to the trash may not remove low level drivers in /library/LaunchAgents and/or /Library/LaunchDaemons.
Support files and folders can be found in lots of places, but won’t be an issue except for the small disk space they use.
Some apps have built in or hidden uninstallers. Malwarebytes has a full uninstall on their menu
After uninstalling and rebooting, I use Etrecheck Pro to see what LaunchAgents or LaunchDaemons are left, and manually remove them
After uninstalling and rebooting, I may use EasyFind to scan for files with the same name as the program and remove them manually. Be careful with this so you only remove the installed files.
