Helllo. I installed the lastest version of avast virus app from download site. Installs fine. When I run a virus scan, eventually it crashes the notebook. If I just let the pc sit, eventually it will crash with same error. It does not crash if I remove avast. I even installed the new beta announced and it does the same thing. The pc runs xp sp2 with all patches and spysweeper. The crashes complain about failure to read hard disk timeout or something like that. I have minidumps of both the released and beta versions of avast. It’s possible there is something going bad with my drive and avast crashing is a symptom, but I don’t know.Would you all be willing to look at the dumps to see if it is avast and any suggestions would be appreciated.
Since you are having problems, I would suggest that you not use the beta version. Beta versions are for evaluation and may have bugs that could compound your problems.
Yes, post the minidump of the release version so someone can look at them.
You can send them to my email address (click the envelope icon below my picture to do this).
The minidumps are located in the Windows\Minidump folder. A couple of them should do (pick the latest ones).
So I took a look at the dump, and I have to say that the conclusion made by the Windows Error Reporting server (the html page you sent to me) seems quite accurate; the thing is, the crash happens because Windows couldn’t load a memory page swapped to a hard drive (this is a critical situation that crashes the whole OS). In other words, it could not read the page file.
Now, the question remains why’s that. It can either be a hardware problem (probably a hard drive in this case) or it can be a software problem. In any case (and I’m saying this will the responsibility) I really doubt it would have anything to do with avast (this conclusion is based on the contents of the minidump file)…
So I’m not sure what to advice now. It seems that the problem is quite accute (the machine crashes multiple times a day) so if it were a hardware problem, it would have to be quite serious (and would probably happen on other parts of the hard drive as well, not only in the swap file).
I’d recommend running a HDD surface scan and see if it reports any bad sectors. Try e.g. HDTune - it’s free and works pretty well. http://www.hdtune.com/
Thanks VLK. I ran chkdsk during this period and it found no errors on the drive. Is that sufficient? It found no errors. My system has been up for 2 days now with avast removed.
I thought I would also mention in spysweeper scans don’t seem to bother the pc. Just to be sure, I disabled spysweeper by disabling all the shields so that it was doing nothing, including no scans, just to make sure there were no conflicts between the two.
A new version of avast was released on 9/6/07. Try downloading the new version, download & run the avast uninstaller, reboot your computer, and then install this new version to see if it will work for you.
Hello. No other virus software just spysweeper. It is a very simple setup. the notebook is seldom used mainly just to do taxes so I can quicken. a couple of dvd players, dvd writers. Thats about it. I have installed the new version, I just have not had chance to run scan yet. Oh and I have office.
Well I have had 1 success and 2 failures. The failure were freezes this time, no crashes. To let yoou know spysweeper has been set sometime ago such that it really isn’t doing much of anything.
These are straight scans, as it comes when installed, i just select the disk drive and disable removable and floppy. I also turn off the sound.
And there might be the root of the problem causing your computers freeze-ups & BSODs. You computer is probably running out of RAM. In today’s world, 512mb should be considered the minimum with 1gb being the average amount. While avast is light on resources, scanning can put quite a load on RAM when large files are being scanned. Do you know what the virtual memory is set at on your computer? That may also be set too low considering the 256mb of RAM.
I can not see all of the other posts while making this post and I do not remember if you mentioned or not … what is the size of the harddrive?
Hello. Sorry it has been a bit. I have a 20gig drive. The VM was min 380 max 760. I upped the max. Now I don’t believe the problem is avast. The error continues always with the error reported at the beginning. Problems reading page file. I get this without avast now. I set spysweeper up to scan and it caused numerous disk errors. Finally noticed just sitting doing nothing got the disk error. What would be your best guess, bad disk or low memory. This pc has always run nortons in the past. I really only use it for quicken. I can’t upgrade both right now. Would you suggest disk or memory. I know its not your place to diagnose my problems now that avast appears ok. I would appreciate it though. I worked for HP until about a year ago. Then my job went to Costa Rica. Otherwise I would replace the drive and add memory.
through add/remove program. yep it is gone. I had switched over to nod32 but was never sure what it was doing exactly, so i removed it also through add/remove. they are completely gone.Like I said I don’t even have avast on it right now and it still managed to crash doing nothing. Got rid of the live update with nortons also. this laptop is probably 6 or 7 years old. Before I do anything once i have finished what I need to do, I am going to reformat the drive and rebuild the system and see if that helps at all.