I am very impressed with this free edition which I installed 3 days ago instead of Avira, mainly because of the comments in the CNET editorial from where I downloaded it. It does not slow the system, but the space it takes up which stated at 90MB has somehow grown to 114MB in these 3 days according to my Vista Drive C Program file!!
One reason I ditched AVG free in favour of Avira free was the way AVG bloated, whereas your editorial advertises the incremental and slimmer approach rather than the cumulative addition of updates (which function perfectly on Automatic although I did test the Manual approach).
1/. Will avast! hard disk usage to continue to increase? Yes.
Throughout its “life” avast! 4.X has been steadily growing in size. Many extra features have been developed and incorporated. The compressed virus definitions have gone from < 10MB to nearly 30MB. Currently on my XP SP3 machine avast! 4.8 Profesional is occupying 148MB, or less than 0.03% of my 500GB primary HDD.
2/. Does this size increase mean it will “continue to bloat”? That depends on what you mean by bloat.
As you say, avast! does not appear to “slow the system”. That’s because for software that is well written and compiled for modern PCs and OSs with fast hard disks, the relationship between size and speed is, if anything, the inverse of what you would first think. I.E Writing software to take up as little disk space as possible creates a bottleneck as CPU cycles and controlling/writing to and from RAM is required to expand/launch an operation on demand.
It’s faster to have the code sitting on the disk from where the bus-mastered hard disk controller can just truck it into RAM without bothering the processor. I fully expect this trend will continue.
Well thank you very much for your superior knowhow in giving more answers than I bargained for! As I mentioned , I gave the reference for size and “bloat”/growth to be the value given under Programs on my drive C.
Avira was 60MB and Avast is 115MB and rising. I thought the object of incremental compressed updates would have the opposite effect.
It certainly does not effect the speed of computing as you say, but with 4GB of RAM it certainly shouldn’t.
Incremental compressed updates refer to their transfer from the Internet. They’re small, but on the harddrive, they occupy ‘full space’. And since there is a backup copy for repair function, they take the space at least twice.
In the product description it was mentioned that updates are incremental in the sense ( as I understood it) that redundant VDF elements would be deleted.
I am not saying that Avast is not excellently effective, but in my own simple way one reason I gave up on AVG was that it just kept increasing in size, whereas Antivir hardly increased over the 6 subsequent months.
Avast is certainly more fun and probably better thought-out than the others, but I suppose (and you can laugh) am conscious of my laptop present capacity of 225GB.
I blame the malware writers. Too prolific.
I guess that’s the main reason the VPS keeps increasing.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if there is a way to exterminate a virus family (software genocide) so as to make it safe to remove the signature/s from the database, unlike, say, smallpox, which (apparently) only exists in labs, now.
Kubecj, isn’t it true that avast should have a better housekeeping?
Why do temp files, logs… etc. are kept into avast folders for ages? For instance, setup.log?
Good question. I tend to run CCleaner twice a week but this won’t help slim down setup.log, for example.
I wouldn’t want to complain too much for such an excellent free product, I just had not anticipated how much space it is taking up. Maybe because as a new user it just needs to stabilise its functions according to my input?
According to WinDirStat avast! is using 13.5% of my 40GB hard drive on my XP Pro system so on a 225GB hard drive it should not occupy that high a percentage of the drive: http://windirstat.info
Big is the wrong word, more like HUGE. Using the same program, mine is only 287.6MB and over 1/2 of that is logs…I agree with Tech on the house keeping…
What consumes the main part of that data…
For ease, there is also a portable version: http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/windirstat_portable
(Installs to one folder and to uninstall, just delete the folder…;))
It should not be necessary to have to go so far as to install new apps to deal with this “bloat” though. It just surprises me from the guys at Alwil, who have forgotten more than I’ll know about the subject, that it seems to grow so fast…
Probably Vladimyr is right (first reply on thread) - but still the program must have its own way of keeping the “chaff” (dead or obsolete stuff) under control!
DavidR
“I stopped using the VRDB and deleted the old avast.int file after disabling the self-defence module.”
I never activated the VRDB but ithe prog still takes up 115Mb after 3 days of use.
Doesn’t deleting the old avast.int file expose you to old threats, most of which are still doing the rounds?
