I have noticed that at some point in time that Avast’s auto update seems to takes forever or does not happen by the time I go offline even if there is an update available. Avast blue update box used to appear after about 5 to 10 minutes after going online via 56k modem but the last few months its been about an hour or never. I had the prior version of Avast and tried a repair of which did not help and then on April 15, I uninstalled Avast and downloaded the new 4.7.981 version and still have the same problem.
For example, yesterday I went online and compared my vps version with the one listed on Avast’s Website to make sure there was an update and there was. I had not went online for a day and my settings are at default to check every 240 minutes and use dial up as my connection. After 45 minutes online I got tired of waiting and I shut down my connection. After a minute or so, Avast appeared in the tray and re-dialed my connection I guess trying to resume the update. After 15 minutes connected again, the Blue Avast box appeared and I clicked on it to see the details. Total time was listed at about 54 minutes and down load time listed was 7 seconds. I usually never spend more than half hour on line and Avast does not seem to auto update within that time period. If I manual update it takes its normal 1 to 2 minute time. I have not noticed any slow down in web surfing or the down loading of files from the web. As far as I can tell, my down load speed is the same as before and is above average for 56k dialup. I have WinXp pro and am just using Microsofts Firewall. I was using Comodo but I thought that it might have been blocking the Avast updates and uninstalled it to see if it made any difference. I added almost all of the avast files to Ms Firewall exceptions list.
Does anyone have any ideas on why it does not update or takes so long to do so? The only software I have installed recently before I noticed the problem was Diskeeper defragmentation software which I would think would not be the cause of the update issue.
Well I don’t really know why you have a problem, I’m on dial-up and the VPS updates are very quick, since avast uses the incremental update method the average size of the VPS update is about 25KB. There are occasionally large VPS updates with lots of new signatures and that could be 100KB and on occasion higher.
So even on dial-up with an average download speed of 4KB per second, it only takes seconds and possibly 1 minute for a larger one.
Have you tried a manual update ?
Are you using a proxy to connect to the internet, like on-speed connection accelerator ?
David, manual updates work normal and I am not using a proxy server or any down load accelerator. What you are saying is correct and that was how Avast always worked on my pc for the last 7 or so years, about a 2 minute update. Would there be anything in the log files that we can use to see whats happening through the update process?
You could check the avast Log Viewer, Setup and Update Tab and see if there is anything in there.
Or look directly in the logs.
C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\DATA\log\setup.log or C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\Setup\setup.log, though I’m not sure it will reveal anything other than it may be having difficulty connecting to the upload servers.
This would seem strange when you have no problem doing a manual update.
What version are you using (latest is 4.7.981, only just released) ?
It may be worth trying a manual program update first and see how that goes, otherwise:
Try a repair of avast. Add Remove programs, select ‘avast! Anti-Virus,’ click the Change/Remove button and scroll down to Repair, click next and follow. You need to be on-line to do this.
I down loaded the new version 4.7.981 a day ago and have the same problem. With the prior version I did try a repair and it did not help so I uninstalled it and replaced with the latest version.
I guess you will have to check out the logs, but going over the original post I found this.
After a minute or so, Avast appeared in the tray and re-dialed my connection I guess trying to resume the update.
Now avast can't initiate a connection it only checks for the presence of a connection and then checks for updates. So it would appear your connection was dropped and that may have re-established the connection (depends on what else you were doing and if your settings, e.g. reconnect if connection drops out).
I have a couple of alternative ISP dial-up accounts so if my main account has a problem I can still connect. If you have an alternative you could set the VPS Auto Update to ask (as I do, I think this is a better option for dial-up, you know there is an update and you can chose to do it then or initiate it manually latter) that will let you know there is an update, ignore it and disconnect. Now connect to an alternative ISP account and connect when you are notified of an update, click the box to start the update.
If you haven’t an alternative connection, just set the Update to ask and click on the notification box and see if that is better.
David, I closed the connection manually along with Firefox because I got tired of waiting for Avast to perform the auto update. It was about a minute after I closed it that I saw in the task bar, the Avast Icon Ball/connection redialing. Once the connection was made, it then took the additional 15 minutes for the update to finish. I do have my connection to redial if dropped. I also tried using a different dial up number to my isp and it does not have any effect.
There is an Update Problem also posted by Crazyd1415 and something mentioned about Avast web server being down. Maybe that was the cause of mine. I will have to check on the next auto update to see if the problem still exist. Maybe it is okay now but I just got the update at a bad time.
One of the problems when a connection is dropped (I generally allow the connection to pick up also) if the were browsing the connection would be re-established. But, if I terminate the connection avast doesn’t re-establish a connection, so I have no idea what is going on, there is ‘no’ function in avast to establish a connection.
If I terminate the connection after a very short time, if avast is in the process of trying to update, it doesn’t even realise my connection has been terminated (it doesn’t try to re-establish) and it cycles through the avast download locations in the servers.def file until it reaches the end and then it pops-up a Red error box that the update has failed. So your update is totally different from mine and I really have no idea why.
I was going top ask you if you know what the ashsimple file in the Avast folder does. I noticed that I have 2 of them which I never noticed having more than one of them. Does that file have anything to do with updates??
Can you think of any other reason or way to tell what is happening with why the auto updates take as long as an hour or more? Avast never did that before on my pc over the last 5 or so years. I did a search on the forum and found the command line RASWaitSeconds in the Avast ini file to tell Avast how long to wait until checking for updates. Could mine be corrupt and maybe not even checking for updates for 50 or so minutes and it just looks like to update took that long?
The RASWaitSeconds isn’t in the avast4.ini file as the default value is I believe 30 seconds, a number of default values don’t appear in the ini file, rather they only appear when a value is changed.
I have changed my RASWaitSeconds value to 120, wait two minutes before checking for updates, this lets me go on-line and do something quickly before the update check was carried out. The reason for this was prior to this latest version of avast the update process had a high priority so you could do little else until this was over, this is obviously lessened as the update process if now set to ‘below normal’ priority.
Unfortunately the RASWaitSeconds ill have no impact on your problem as it isn’t related to any slow download, but delaying the update check for dial-up users.
[url=http://I did a search on the forum and found the command line RASWaitSeconds in the Avast ini file to tell Avast how long to wait until checking for updates. Could mine be corrupt and maybe not even checking for updates for 50 or so minutes and it just looks like to update took that long?]I did a search on the forum and found the command line RASWaitSeconds in the Avast ini file to tell Avast how long to wait until checking for updates. Could mine be corrupt and maybe not even checking for updates for 50 or so minutes and it just looks like to update took that long?[/url]
If it were corrupt the more likely scenario would be it wouldn’t check and not appear to be taking longer as effectively there would be no check.
So for you to find the RASWaitSeconds in the abast4.ini is strange, it isn’t there by default, what value is assigned ?
This is an extract of what is in my avast for.ini [InetWD] section, you could change the value, but I doubt it would have an effect on the problem.
For some reason, the update process could be hanged and so it takes that long to execute.
Is there anything in setup.log file that allow us to guess what’s wrong?
The RasWaitSeconds is not in my file. I just read it in another post and assumed the line was there by default and that I might have just been missing the command line. I will have to check the log file but that won’t be for another 10 hrs or so til I get home from work. I was trying to remember how far back the problem started to give me some clues. My wife and I both have accounts and since she is home during the day, I always thought that Avast was updating when she was online and that was the reason why I never saw the blue update box appear in the first 5 minutes of going online. It was just a day or so ago when I noticed that my Avast VPS was different than what was posted on Avasts main page and I had been online about 1/2 hour and I did not get any update noticfication.
I was wondering if maybe I should have cleaned out all my temp files before installing the latest version of Avast. I forgot to mention that after I installed Avast, the vrdb icon was missing, even after reboot and I re-installed it again and the vrdb icon did come back.
Download the avast! Uninstall Utility, find it here and save it to your HDD so you can find it later.
Then uninstall, reboot, run the uninstall utility, reboot, install, reboot.
If you haven’t got it already it would probably be best to download the latest version of avast and save it to your HDD, somewhere you can find it again. Use that when you reinstall.
I am going to try it tonight. There are some things I found yesterday that makes me believe a bad install or corrupt files. I tried a manual update yesterday and everything seemed to download but I did not get any update info following it. My log file and “About Avast Info” still shows last update as Sunday April 15 at 6.45pm. I then tried a manual update from the VPS file that I down loaded yesterday (Tues April 17th) from Avasts site and when I tried to run it, Avast told me that the VPS file that I had down loaded/installing was older than the VPS file I currently had. That did not make any sense.