As anyone else experienced this problem? My XP system was slow beyond belief. Eight or 9 min. for Outlook to load.
My Dell service technician went through every setting and look into task manager for other programs that might be running and consuming resources. Nothing!
For some reason I thought about avast auto sandbox and turned it off. My system immediately returned to normal. Whatever the sandbox was doing it was not reflected in the task manager settings of programs running. However turning it off solved the problem.
Of course I am leaving it off but if anyone knows a workaround I would like to reactivate that extra nature of security.
What you don’t mention that would be crucial is the system specifications ?
You also don’t say what avast version you are using, free/pro/ais ?
You also mention in the auto-sandbox, which you can’t selectively load Outlook in the auto-sandbox, for that you need the Full Sandbox feature, which is only available in the Pro and AIS (paid) versions.
If you have the avast free version, there should be zero overhead with the auto-sandbox unless avast popped-up suggesting to do so (see image example, which I would find strange for Outlook). Is this what happened ?
I cited Outlook merely as an example of system programs being slow. This same experience occurred with Firefox, NaturallySpeaking, Acrobat etc. I did not do anything knowingly with auto sandbox. It has been on since I upgraded to 6.0 free some three or four weeks ago. I do not have the knowledge or skill, let alone the interest, to attempt anything other than turning on the computer.
For what it’s worth, I have XP and Microsoft office 2003 with all of the patches automatically installed. I have four gig of RAM, 175 GB of free space on my system drive and three other internal and two external hard drive. I do not have any sophisticated hardware or software to manipulate (overclock etc.) the system.
After several weeks of expected operation my computer slowed to a crawl. The Dell technician, after he could get in, looked at the various Windows files, commenting that it was so slow he couldn’t believe it, and found nothing to explain the slowdown.
I happen to think about the auto sandbox and turned it off. After that the system ran flawlessly and speedily. If anyone has had a like experience and knows how to get around this issue I would like to hear from them.
The auto-sandbox is passive until it is called by the file system shield and then only if you elect to use it on the pop-up would it use any system resources. So that isn’t the cause of any slowdown on your system.
Given the above I can’t see how disabling what is effectively passive makes any difference. Have you made any changes to the avast default settings, especially to the File System Shield ?
Have (or did) you another Anti-Virus installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
What other security based software do you have installed, firewall, anti-spyware, etc. ?
Personally I accept all of your arguments that auto sandbox could not have been the cause of the system slowing to a crawl.
However, immediately if not instantly after I turned it off, unchecked the box, my system to my amazement, and the Dell technician who was monitoring things, my computer returned to it’s normal speed.
I believe it was Sherlock Holmes who said “after you eliminate the impossible whatever remains must be true.”
I thank everyone who took the time to offer their thoughts. I now declare these proceedings are concluded (I will not check back for further messages).