???
Hello.
I just recently saw this program on Download.com.
I desperately need an antivirus, so I came upon this. I was extremely happy.
I was almost going to install it, when I came to a potential problem…I have all requirements, EXCEPT 32MB RAM. I only have 16. I was going to install the HOME version.
Will it work anyway? I hope so. I need something in the background while I surf the web.
If not, is the DOS version a good alternative?
THANSK FOR YOUR TIME!!
Hi, smslord, and welcome to avast,
You’ll have to wait for a tech expert to reply to your specific question relating to avast requirements, but that shouldn’t be long.
Generally, however, you should be definitely looking at adding memory. While there’s no hard-and-fast rules, there’s pretty general agreement that 128 meg is rock-bottom minimum these days, especially for surfing the web. Shop around and see what you can find to bump up your system.
Best,
Mike
I don’t know how is your system and for what do you use it but, DOS version won’t be a solution because you won’t have a resident running in background and avoiding virus infection. DOS version can only scan on-demand and not on-access. Anyway, there is an avast DOS version in the website.
Thanks for the info!
The thing was that, I obtained an old IBM APTIVA PC. It only had 16MB RAM. When I tried installing the program, it worked, but it would take an eternity to load on the desktop (Windows 95).
I recently added another 16MB RAM, for a total of 32MB.
It works great! Loading times is still long, but acceptable (around 40 seconds to load up on the desktop when i boot the machine).
My new question is this…the more RAM I have, the faster it will load? You see, I am interested in getting 64MB RAM for the APTIVA, since it is dead cheap ($6 on Ebay!). If I put this, will the antivirus load faster on the desktop when I boot the PC?
My Aptiva specs are:
166Mhz Pentium (256K)
3GB HDD
32MB RAM
2 CDROM drives
Windows 95 (First release)
There is never too much RAM ;D
The major slowdown of the operating system is caused by swapping - it occurs when the operating system doesn’t have enough memory for the current application, so it saves some of the data stored in memory to disk, to free the part of memory for the new data. If you get more memory, the swapping won’t happen that often, and the system will be faster.
By default, the behaviour of Windows 9x memory management is very strange. To make your system faster, I would suggest the following changes:
Go to the Windows directory, find the system.ini file and open it in Notepad.
Save the changes and restart your system. It may give you some more speed.
(The particular values for the file cache can be different, this is just my guess of “good” values. It is important to limit the size reasonably - otherwise, the cache will “eat” most of the memory and there will be no memory left for the applications).
Hi smslord
I thought I was scraping along with the bare minimum - your system makes my 128MB 450MHz win95B machine look rather swish!
Igor’s right - it’s probably worth playing around with the memory settings (plenty of advice out there - keep a note of the changes!). Killing off programmes and processes that you don’t actually need can help too. I haven’t found that memory management programmes help - although cacheman does make changing some of the settings easier.
Judging from how mine runs I’d say get the extra memory - if Avast doesn’t need it, something else will! I only got my system running to my satisfaction when I got the memory up to 128MB. Having said that - it all worked fine with only 64MB, Avast would run in the background without causing any real slowdown. Actually running a virus check is another matter, but I generally go and do something else while that’s happening :).
Cheers
Matt