Hi all,
I was forced into doing a repair, the old motherboard died. Messy situation, didn’t have opportunity to
uninstall all the old drivers and did not want to do a fresh install. So, after putting in another board and cpu,
ran the Bart PE recovery disk utility to reset the HDD driver controllers, it successfully booted up.
Installed new drivers from Flash drive . The last thing I did was install the network card drivers.
Avast was sitting there all this time waiting to pounce. It detected something was wrong, downloaded and installed
the latest version. Seemed to install successfully, rebooted but the system was as slow as molasses. Something clearly wrong.
Uninstalled and ran avastsclear. Attempted to reinstall avast 2245, my preferred version. But after the avast logo appeared
on the screen it disappeared and there was no further progress.
I’ve picked up some logs from the setup.
Any assistance appreciated.
PS how come the forum attachment tool does not allow zip or 7z files? Could have made this data transfer much smaller
well some weird stuff happened . I downloaded the full offline installer and I got this error, (see image)
I was not sure how to check the hash, so I downloaded it again and did a binary compare, they were identical.
Next I downloaded the small installer and installed OK, except the avast svc was not started until I had rebooted XP.
One thing strange, it almost seemed as if it remembered settings from an earlier install, for example,
the icon was not set not to rotate, as I usually set it.
Where could this changed setting have come from, I had already run avast_clear in safemode with networking earlier
If you replace a motherboard and/or CPU, you always need to perform a clean installation of the OS and drivers.
If you don’t, you can expect to get problems.
As I mentioned the old board crashed, I had no choice but to tackle it as it was when I was booted up on the new board.
It’s an ugly thing, you get Windows prompting to search for drivers here and there. I already had the drivers on a Flash drive
so I dismissed all the Windows driver prompts.
One of the first things I did was to disable the avast shields. It was a mistake, would have been far better to have uninstalled
right at the beginning, it would have been OK, I had no net connection, the drivers weren’t even installed.
Eventually after numerous uninstalls of old drivers and installing the new, once the network was active avast automatically downloaded
and updated itself. I have mentioned this at least twice recently, this is a very poor behavior, avast should not update after doing
an automatic repair.
It does this because it sets the preferences to default and the “Update” option reverts to “automatic” << this causes nothing but trouble.
IT would be far better for avast to prompt the user once it discovers it’s environment has changed that a clean install is advised -
instead of going ahead and doing repair/ automatically updating
I would like to get the avast developers take on this, I have heard nothing and I think my point is legitimate.
Yes, I picked up a used board with the FX-4300 and 4GB of DDR3. Nowhere near state of the art, but much better than what I had.
I’ll have to update my sig now.
I still would go for a real clean installation.
It will prevent problems and at the same time, the system will run really smooth especially with the 4Gb and if you have a decent graphics card in it.
Regarding avast, It is clean now, after the auto update the system was incredibly slow, it was apparent the uninstall/clean was necessary,
which I did. Just the minimum install, the two shields .
A clean install of XP is out of the question; I have the media, but my install has been in use for years and I can’t imagine
how long it would take to rebuild. I’m not doing that. I’m pretty good at cleaning up old stuff, so I’ve maintained it this way.
With support for XP dropped, fresh install becomes an even more challenging task
Unfortunately, for now, I’m using the onboard video and it’s pretty limited - ATI Radeon 3000 graphics.
I will soon be researching a card; something that will match the other components performance.
If the card is too high end, the rest of the system will bottle neck it, and a waste of money. If the card is too low end the
card itself will be the bottle neck, looking to find the sweet spot. Any thoughts on what to look at ?
I have an Nvidia GT 610 sitting in the cupboard, but I don’t think it’s that much better than the onboard video
On-board graphics are using the systems ram, a card has it’s own memory onboard.
You should get better performance with the card, especially when it comes to graphics handling.
Don’t forget to disable the on-board graphics if you are gonna use the card
Remove avast completely.
Doing it through control panel and using aswclear is not doing that.
Delete all folders/files, delete all registry entries.
For several of the registry entries you will need to change the permission before you can delete them.
No memory problems but I did find newer a version of the network adapter driver. Once that was installed, re-downloaded
the stub installer and avast installed normally. Could there actually have been a bad driver corrupting the data?
The first version of the driver was from the motherboard manufacturers website, while the newer version came directly from the Realtek site.
There’s probably not too many users in my situation, ie. upgrade in hardware and still running XP.
I thought about what you said and installed a fresh copy of XP on an old HDD I had laying around
(Maxtor 10 GB UDMA33 drive from 2000). It took a while but it worked perfectly.
For my two live systems I decided to do the repair install available when booting from the XP CD.
I can report that this also fixed the problem. No more crashes in avast, Firefox, etc, etc.
Thanks Eddy
