AVG 2012 Not Able To Recognize License Number

A friend of mine was having trouble with her laptop. She is using AVG 2012 for her anti-virus software. When she tried to update her virus definitions, the following error comes up on the AVG user interface.

"AVG is not able to recognize your license number".

My friend no longer knew her license number since she installed the program months ago and she was merely using the free edition from download.com.

I searched on Google and most sites recommended a complete re-installation of the program. To me, it seemed strange that freeware was asking for a genuine license. Shouldn't that be implicit when you are using the software freely? But as I would find out later on during the re-installation process, the license number is shown during the installation and I would advice that anyone installing AVG take note of this number and write down a copy of it in case the error above comes up again.

So in order to fix this problem, I would recommend the following steps.

1. For computers using the x32 version, ownload a copy of AVG 2012's offline installer from here. The size of the file is 137 MB so you might want to grab a snack while waiting. The reason I'm recommending downloading the offline installer is because a lot of things can happen if you have an unreliable internet connection like mine. And an intermittent connection can result in a corrupted installation. You can also check the links from this website.
2. Once you have the file downloaded to your desktop, double click it and follow the instructions. Choose the "Repair" option if possible. What this does based on my understanding is it only checks the existing installation for corrupted files and will only replace those files. This process should be faster rather than doing a complete re-installation. You also get to retain previous updates that AVG might have applied after it was installed.
3. The last step is to update AVG. Again, for people with intermittent connections, I would recommend a manual (offline) update. Go to AVG's webpage for manual updates. Download all the files that is applicable to your AVG installation. Then choose the option to update from a directory location, and browse to the folder where you stored the downloaded files.

That's it, you should be good to go. I hope this guide is helpful to anyone having problems with AVG.

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