Avast Free optimization/caching issues

Hello, I have recently installed Avast on two older notebooks. It seems to run fine on the faster one but on the older, P3 650 MHz with 256MB ram it seems to really be dragging things down.

I just did a full system scan thinking it would make things faster because of the transient and persisting caching, but immediately after the full scan the real time shield page registered files scanned (about 80 from opening Firefox) when I opened an app. Does this indicate whether the caching features are working? I don’t know if it counts it as “scanned” even if they are not fully processed because I just did a full scan.

Also, there were files that were not able to be scanned because the files were not found. (error (3) system cannot find path) They were under the avast5\defs path, specifically DLL files algo, aswcleanerdll, aswcmnbs, aswcmnis, aswcmnos, aswengin, aswscan.

Updates have failed on occasion but I suspect that was because it was also doing windows update at the same time.

Anyway any help along these lines or just optimizing for such a slow system would be appreciated, I’m giving this notebook away to someone in need.

The cache does not change the files number. It just accelerate the scanning.
File not found could be deleted within the scanning.

Can you try to repair your installation?
Go to Control Panel > Add/Remove programs > avast! antivirus > Remove. Then choose Repair function in the popup window (Repair).

I got this error message after the first reboot. I repaired and rebooted again and now it seems to be okay, though still slow… I think maybe something like XUbuntu instead of Windows is called for!

How “old” is that notebook? I mean, how much RAM does it have?
And which is the operational system?

256 megs of ram, and I have XP on it right now. It originally shipped with Win 98 so it’s really kind of from another era…

Yeah, you won’t be able to get out of slowdowns…
Ubuntu could be the solution for that notebooks.

+1