Recently, Avast 8 Free began to considerably slowing down the system, to the point that it took 3:00-4:00 mins to start up (According to Soluto).
I tryed to reinstall Avast, not helped. Tryed to uninstall all shields, except the File System shields, and this solved the problem for only a brief amount of time, before my system had once again took about 2:55 mins to start up and Avast took 77 secs to load (According to Soluto), despite only the File system shield installed.
How to solve this problem?
Make a clean install with the latest version, and see if there’s any changes.
Try a Selective Startup. It only loads system services, and startup items.
Go to Start and type msconfig in the search box. Hit enter.
Under the General tab, check selective startup.
Go to the Startup tab, and see if there are any programs you can remove from the Startup menu.
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When I reinstalled Avast 8, I did a clean install with the lastest version (All shields installed), didn’t help.
This willn’t help, as Avast is the cause of the long running time according to Soluto, so the problem is with Avast itself.
Avast is just getting so bloated I think we just have to get used to the slowness at boot up. My computer is very sluggish at every boot up for about 2 or 3 minutes because of Avast. And yes I have the latest version of Avast 8 and it didn’t improve anything. I have used Avast for years going back to version 4. The older versions never bogged my system down. Avast is just getting too bloated. I have an AMD Phenom II CPU at 3.84ghz, 8gb of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory at 1600mhz, a Radeon HD7850 GPU, and I’m running Windows 7 64bit. There is no way my system should be slow at startup. Avast 8 just hogs the resources at boot up. I have even run an msconfig and start up with the bare minimum. I haven’t found a way yet to stop Avast from doing this.
You guys must have crappy system specs or way too much stuff loaded on start up. From a cold start-to login screen- desktop = 45 seconds. A good defrag and boot defrag with Auslogics Pro works great. Soluto will always show any antivirus is slowing up your boot time. Try AVG, Norton, Bitdefefender, Panda, Kaspersky and you will get the same results. Most of you are mistaken but the topic “bloat”. Bloat does not mean it drags your system. Bloat is adding tons of extras into a product that is unneeded. Such as Norton360. The only think Avast actually added with a software updater. But that is actually security related due to vulnerabilities in today’s software. Especially Java. I am a Bitdefender fan an they even have a software updater. Avast can be fine tuned right down the the install. Only install what you want. Its that easy.
Dell XPS Laptop:
Core i5
8 GB of Ram
1 TB HDD
I don’t know what the problem is, but I know it’s not Avast.
From power on to the Windows starting screen: 35 seconds
From the Windows starting screen to the logon screen: 20 seconds
From the logon screen to Windows running: 10 seconds
I only have two startup programs. Avast and Windows. Avast is first. If you have Windows booting first, I would guess that something is delaying Avast startup.
Do you have this enabled in Avast"
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Try this:
- Reboot 3 times. After each boot wait 5 min then reboot
- After the 3rd reboot wait 5 min then open “cmd”
- Copy and paste this “Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks”
- Hit enter after pasting it. Open up task manager and be sure the defrag.exe is running. (It may take a min or 2)
- This will tell Windows to defrag and optimize the bootup according to the prefetch data
- Reboot
- Defrag
- Reboot
Here is a complete list for the Windows 7 Defrag Switches:
- Process Idle Tasks: Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
- Defrag Boot Files : Defrag /b C:
- Defrag Options: Defrag
- List of commands:
• /A - Perform analysis on the specified volumes.
• /B - Boot optimization to defrags the boot sector of the boot volume (ex: Windows drive). This will not work on a SSD.
• /C - Perform the operation on all volumes.
• /E - Perform the operation on all volumes except those specified.
• /F - Forces defragmentation of the volume when free space is low.
• /H - Run the operation at normal priority (default is low).
• /M - Run the operation on each volume in parallel in the background.
• /R - Performs partial defragmentation (default). Attempts to consolidate only fragments smaller than 64 megabytes (MB).
• /T - Track an operation already in progress on the specified volume.
• /U - Print the progress of the operation on the screen.
• /V - Print verbose output containing the fragmentation statistics.
• /X - Perform free space consolidation on the specified volumes. - Best Performance: Defrag C: /H /U /V
- defrag c: -b
My troubleshooting settings status in my avast 8:
You means defrag the system files (Page file, metadata, etc…)?
I do this every several times with my PerfectDisk 12.5 (Offline defrag). Not solves the problem.
I did Defrag C: /H /U /V /B , rebooted my computer, and this seems to solve this problem for now (Soluto says 2:08 mins boot-up time, and only 15 secs for Avast start-up).
Is the “Offline Defrag” option in Perfectdisk 12.5, does the same actions?
You don’t need a 3rd party defragger when Windows 7 Defragger is just fine.
I have the exact same problem and i can tell you for sure that’s Avast’s fault. Or, to be precise, it’s the updater’s fault: once the boot has ended the updater starts and for some unknown reason it absolutely trashes the hdd - in, usually, over 2 minutes it manages to make more than 40,000 I/O Reads and over 20,000 I/O Writes. It uses the hdd so much that the entire OS (XP SP3 in my case) is absolutely frozen - nothing moves, nothing works (you can’t even open the Task Manager).
No, it’s not a bad config, i run a bare bones install of Avast - i disabled WebRep since i’ve discovered that most of its flags are obsolete and if there is a threat the Web Shield will kick in, the Software Updater and 2 other shields. No. it’s not a XP fault - i have just the internet connection and the Opera browser in the autostart and i never have more than 18 processes running (15 at this moment).
No this is clearly caused by a bad coding in the updater. And i can even point when it has started - with the V7. But it has got worse and worse with every new version. At this moment it’s so bad that i’m thinking of dumping Avast.
Perfectdisk is better than Windows 7 build in defragger. It haven’t the limitations that Windows defragger have.
You obviously don’t know the power of Windows 7 Defragger. PD also is constantly running on the back round and that’s absurd.
You are absolutely right. And a note to Aventador. Please reread my post above. I do not have a slow system or numerous items starting upon boot as you suggest. The problem did start with Avast 7 and has gotten worse with each release. I also know what the word bloat means and it’s exactly what’s happening to Avast. When the only things that change on my computer is the versions of Avast I know the problem lies there. I stopped using AVG years ago because it got too slow and bloated. Just like Avast 8.
Just for grins I uninstalled Avast 8 today. Installed MSE and the boot up slowdowns are gone. I went back to Avast 8 because I trust Avast a bit better than I do Microsoft. But I would like the speed of my old Avast back again.
I also want to add that my boot up time from cold and dark to full desktop is also under a minute. What I am gripping about are the 2 to 3 minutes after that when I can’t use my computer because Avast is hogging it so much it slows to a crawl. After this 2 to 3 minutes then my computer runs extremely fast as it should. See I too can brag about my boot up times.
The problem could be with Avast, but it’s not affecting everyone. If it was bloat, shouldn’t everyone experience the same thing?
Try turning Software Updater off, and see if that solves the problem.
It’s either a scan or the VBS update process.
You can also have Avast load only after other services are loaded under settings. Seems to me like someone is complaining that after they boot up Avast is slowing there system down. Could be a bandwidth issue which is completely unrelated to Avast. I am on a 20MB connection so I never notice any bandwidth problems.