Story: One night I was browsing the internet (Facebook and YouTube to be accurate) and suddenly my PC went out of control.
Windows become unresponsive, keyboard won’t input, start menu won’t start, mouse can move but can’t click anything. So it goes
for 5 minutes until everything responded but again freezes instantly. So I decided to forcefully shutdown and restart my computer
and huge boot-time occurred. Normally my computer would boot in less than 2 minutes but in this case it booted for 4~5 minutes.
After booting, I immediately closed my internet connection and do a full-time virus and malware scan, everything was clean. After
that I opened my browser (Chrome) and went back to browsing but after a minute, same problem occurred.
I forcefully restarted my computer again and this time anything won’t load at all. Desktop files won’t load their proper image
and everything is unresponsive except for one, task manager. I opened it and saw the hard disk at 100% which is normal when
starting the computer but one thing’s strange, the read speed of the disk is at 0 while the write speed is at normal. So I went
to restart my computer again and activate safe mode. At that time I planned some few testings:
- Google chrome problem,
- A strong potential virus/malware
- A bugged driver
- A hard disk failure
At that time I was very frustrated and had no time to check it one by one so I did a full scan again and same results, clean.
Then I run a disk checkup and defrag, all fine. Instead of uninstalling or updating my drivers and programs, I decided
to do a clean-boot up, all services are disabled but running my computer in normal mode. I was surprised to see it work,
everything is fast again even the boot-up time. That time I decided to enable all services again and restart. Once again,
everything was fine except for few things:
- Avast interface is working but services/shields are disabled.
- Base Filtering Engine (BTE) is disabled, firewall won’t turn on
- Windows Defender is asking to be enabled since the main anti-virus is disabled
And so I tried enabling my firewall but obviously it won’t start since BTE is currently disabled. Next I tried enabling Avast but
it won’t start for some reason, same with windows defender. So then I did a Avast repair tool and it fixed the problem (shields
went on), but it required me to restart my computer and so I did. Upon restarting, everything was bad again and so I restarted to
safe mode and uninstalled Avast. Now I am writing this and no problem occurred since then. I don’t know what is happening with
the AV, but I won’t reinstall it until I find reason behind this. It took my whole day fixing this problem and I am a very
unhappy with this event.
TL;DR; Avast causing computer/hard disk failure and would freeze upon booting, uninstalling the AV fixed the problem.