Anti-virus software can be a great help to keep viruses and malware at bay, but AVG takes its responsibilities a bit further. Avid BitTorrent users who download files at near-maximum speeds get a friendly reminder from AVG explaining that they may want to pause their downloads to improve web browsing.

In recent years anti-piracy vendors have shown a keen interest in file-sharing and online piracy issues.

Symantec, for example, has developed a technology that allows it to spot fake torrents and malware before they’re downloaded.

On the other hand, rival McAfee have taken an anti-piracy approach by inventing a system that can detect and block pirated material from any website and present users with authorized and legal alternatives instead.

This week we learned that AVG, another major player in the anti-virus business, is keeping an eye on BitTorrent traffic as well. Not to detect intruders or stop piracy, but to give users some friendly advice.

BitTorrent traffic can chew up a lot of bandwidth and cripple one’s local network, especially with badly configured clients. This can slow down web browsing to a crawl, something AVG is alerting its users to.

The following alert pops up for some BitTorrent users. In this case related to traffic generated by uTorrent, but it may appear for other clients as well.

Hey torrenter…

While not everyone may like the fact that their anti-virus software has begun commenting on their torrenting habits, the advice may be useful to some. As far as we know AVG is not looking at what people download, just the network load generated by the application.

Those who want to get rid of the notifications can tick the ‘AVG Advisor Notification’ box in the software settings.