I have been using avast free antivirus for several years now.
Recently, after updating my laptop to avast 8.1483, I begin to experience frequent startup hangs. The hangs occurred daily, mostly, right after the first startup of each day, from what I have noticed.
The symptom of the issue can be described as having the Desktop and Taskbar locked up immediately after the startup process, with no respond to mouse and keyboard input. Whenever I encounter this problem, the only solution that I have is to force reset the pc by unplugging the laptop from its power and reboot again.
I have did various reformatting myself to identify the cause of the problem and went to my pc manufacturer for a hardware diagnostic.
I am pretty sure that avast 8 is causing the hanging issue right now as the problem only occurs right after I installed avast 8.1483 on my system.
I would like to seek some assistance on this issue.
-Windows 7 Home Premium x64 bit, with Service Pack 1 (Acer Aspire 5820TG) with latest windows update
-No other security related software were installed
-Original OEM harddrive image came with Mcafee AV preinstalled but I have already uninstalled it and used McAfee Consumer Product Removal tool to remove any leftovers from the program.
Additional Information:
-Went to Acer Service Centre to see if there is any hardware fault, but the technician there inspected with no issue on the hardware.
-Performed reformat by using OEM recovery program, program still occurs when avast is installed.
What other software is loaded upon start up? How many programs are in your system tray actively running? I am also on Win 7 64bit with no issues at all. My pc actually boots faster with Avast then any other av out there. You can do a diagnostic start up too see how fast your pc boots. Actually try this out and see who the culprit is.
@asyn, I tried your method and still encounter the hanging issue.
My cursor was able to move after the startup, however, when I try to click the start button or the icons in the taskbar, the cursor turned into a “rotating motion” icon, thereafter there is no response to keyboard or any move input.
@Aventador, Hi , there are several software loaded at startup. Active program running at system tray only 5 ( Avast, Intel RST, Synaptics touchpad, Logitech zonetouch and acer video conference manager.
I have saved a list of startup program in the file attached. The list is generated from ccleaner.
Thank you for the suggestion, but I not been a fan of using software in beta stages due to instability and possible performances and incompatibility issue.
I happen to chance upon my windows event log and found several error in the log pertaining to avast services.
Details of one of logs are as below:
Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance
Date: 21/04/2013 10:35:48 PM
Event ID: 101
Task Category: Boot Performance Monitoring
Level: Error
Keywords: Event Log
User: LOCAL SERVICE
Computer: Home-PC
Description:
This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process:
File Name : AvastSvc.exe
Friendly Name : avast! Service
Version : 8.0.1483.72
Total Time : 53362ms
Degradation Time : 48362ms
Incident Time (UTC) : 2013-04-21T14:33:23.687200300Z
Event Xml:
Its called an incompatibility issue. Maybe completely unrelated to Avast. You can do a diagnostic start up or you can just simply uninstall Avast and see what happens. Yoi have way too many start up items as it is. I only have 8 items cause i slimmed down my start up. Most of what I see can easily be disabled. Especially the Apple stuff.
I guess this problem hasn’t been solved, because I had the problem of constant reboots on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate. I did several clean installs and even bought a new SSD-drive to install Windows on. Clean install with only two installed programs (Firefox and Avast) reboots, but with only Firefox everything works fine. Will this problem be solved?
As I mentioned in my earlier message, I’m using 64-bit Windows 7 Pro Ultimate. Only thing installed is Firefox and all the latest Windows updates. I’ve been using Avast for several years, probably doesn’t matter that it was Norton some 10 years ago. And it’s Avast Free.
Only program installed is Firefox and works fine. There’s no going around it, it’s a bug in Avast Free. Too much trouble for antivirus.
Just a heads up, despite all the solutions provided in this thread, I am still experiencing this issue.
I have two laptops running on both windows 7 x32 and x64 bit edition. Both of these laptops are running avast 8.0.1489 and; have been defragged regularly, have start up programs reduced to almost none and installed avast with minimum feature (Just the AV only, without the fanciful Software Updater and stuff). Yet, the problem still occurs.
Could anyone inform the developer about this issue, I am pretty sure most windows 7 users will encounter this. Hopefully, they could resolve this by the next update.
I’ve had a similar problem since Avast 7, though it’s probably worse since the release of Avast 8. There’s frequently a long period of black screen at start up before the desktop appears, it’s never not started but the black screen sometimes lingers for long enough to give me a scare. The problem isn’t sufficiently significant for me to ditch Avast, which I consider to be an excellent low-resource AV (once the computer is up and running!), but the slow start up with the black screen is an annoyance.