I have a Toshiba NB-305 netbook (1 GB of RAM) with Windows 7. I purchased Avast! (5.0.594) Internet Security yesterday and have had nothing but trouble with it. Upon installing the program and restarting the computer, the whole system slowed to a crawl. It took 10 minutes to boot, and once Windows loaded the CPU usage was at 100 percent and never went down. Avast! was also unresponsive when I tried to disable the firewall (which I thought might have been the cause of the slowness after reading older forum postings). After spending hours attempting to deal with this problem, I uninstalled Avast! and everything went back to normal.
Have other people had this same problem with Avast! Internet Security? I personally am quite shocked that ALWIL would release such a buggy program, especially since it was not the free version but rather a paid one. I must say that I feel rather cheated.
Prior to using Avast! Internet Security, I used a program called Sophos Anti-Virus (I had a licence from my university). I removed Sophos after installing Avast. I also had Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware installed on my computer, which was still installed when I ran Avast.
I have had the same problem with the newest Avast version. It has gotten so bad that I have stopped installing Avast on my clients’ computers altogether. It was slowing their computers to a crawl.
I discovered this problem a few days back, but I’ve also gotten into the habit of “don’t panic”.
Here is what I did to create this problem on my system [produces same effects, which is helpful for developers]:
Avast is installed, most modern version, full AIS suite.
I install a game via steam that automatically installs the windows Visual C++ 2005 redistributable.
Whoops, machine now runs at 100% CPU usage for system.exe [you need to show all processes to see it in win 7].
This is mainly because the Visual C++ installation fails; horribly, by not telling you it has failed or rolling back it’s changes.
Now, to solve the problem:
Reboot the machine, holding down F8 to gain access to the windows startup options menu.
Select Safe Mode.
Go to the control panel in the now dramatically faster interface, and select programs and features.
Select avast, right click, uninstall, tell the avast launcher to uninstall.
After reboot the system should be semi-sane again. You can now reinstall the package that caused the problem.
After the installation is over, you can now reinstall Avast.
I’ve been able to recreate this problem on two separate machines where I have Avast installed.
So, I’ll be a bit more careful when it comes to some automatic installers, but I hope in future that a fix for this issue will be forthcoming.
P.S: Now, running Metro 2033 on a reasonable laptop was going to be an initially slow experience while tweaking it.
However, if you get hit by that bug as it auto-starts, be prepared to spend a lot of time carefully moving the mouse through the sideshow menu to exit it.
