Thanks for a response Pat
But I *won't* be upgrading to AVG 8 entirely because of this feature, and will no longer suggest it as an option to my friends and family.
There are a few reasons for this.
1) Every computer and every NAT router has a limit to the number of concurrent connections it can support. This total varies according to the firmware and model of router.
I use a bittorrent client a fair bit to download various pieces of open-source software. Due to the way torrents work, these clients tend to utilise a large number of concurrent connections.
I have to limit this number to get an acceptable browsing experience on the various machines connected to my router - as I want to download as quickly as possible, I limit this to the maximum that gives me a good browsing experience.
This function in AVG 8 grabs around 10-20 connections every time I visit Google or the other supported search engine pages.
2) Many broadband customers have download limits, before either being charged quite a lot extra, being cut off, or having their download speeds greatly limited.
Some of these limits are quite low.
3) My connection is fundamentally shared with everybody else at my local exchange. If everybody suddenly starts downloading all the hits from any page of Google, my internet experience will suffer.
4) If a webmaster sees a massive spike in traffic, that's going to cost them a fair bit extra in bandwidth charges. Given that any extra traffic produced by a 'bot' such as the AVG LinkScanner cannot possibly gain them any advertising revenue, all such extra bandwidth expenditure is wasted.
It's doubly wasted because no human ever sees the result of that bandwidth, so even those sites which don't rely on advertising and are simply providing a totally free service will suffer.
Many smaller sites may either hit their daily limits early and thus be unreachable for much of the day, or suffer such extra costs that they are forced to close.
5) When travelling, I connect in many places that have terms and conditions including "You may not use download accelerator products".
The way such products operate is to visit every link on a page and start to download them while you're reading.
My bandwidth provider is unlikely to see any difference between such products and the AVG LinkScanner, and therefore may hold me in breach of the T&C of the connection they provide and block me.
This feature will cost me, personally some hard-earned cash, and therefore I do not want it.