I’ve been running avast4.8 for over a year now on my vintage pc (pentium 4 circa 2002). I’ve noticed since June this year, it’s been conducting rootkit scans that takes 10-30 min to finish. It bugs me as it slows down the startup. It never used to be like that from March of last year until early June this year. Then one June 20 I noticed it was taking much longer than it used to to load everything up. I dismissed my concern as it didn’t happen again until July 15. From then on it’s been occurring every 2-4 days. Along with that, I also checked up my System Log and saw my AvastWeb Service having trouble starting up probly due to the heavy load of the RootKit scan. How do i resolve this issue?
Where are you getting the information that the rootkit scan is a) running and b) how long it takes ?
What is your OS ?
The rootkit scan doesn’t start for 8 minutes after boot, so it shouldn’t prevent the Web Shield from loading.
My rootkit scan takes about 3 seconds, but my system spec is likely to be much higher, but the rootkit scan shouldn’t be a high resource user.
avast 4.8.1368 is I believe the latest 4.8 version and it hasn’t had a program update for some time, certainly much earlier than June this year. This is in no doubt due to the release of avast 5 in January this year, so any change in 4.8 I would imagine be security related and that hasn’t been the case. avast 4.8 will cease to be supported at the end of this year.
So I would suggest installing avast5 if you don’t have win9.x or winME installed, which I doubt as the rootkit scan doesn’t run on these OSes.
It appears you are right, i tried running the rootkit scan manually after viewing another post and it didn’t take that long to scan. Checked the log and it was all fine. However on occasion (bout 2-4 days since July 15) my web scan takes eons to load. I checked on my System Log and here’s what it say:
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the avast! Web Scanner service to connect.
The avast! Web Scanner service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
It does this for an ungodly 10 or more minutes before it finally sends a start control for it to run while other services are loading. I am running Windows XP SP2 Professional that came with the PC when i bought it years ago and I’m very much considering installing avast5 on this machine. My only concern is would it slow down this computer (circa 2002 1.3 Ghz P4, PC133 512MB SDRAM). I currently need this PC as i’m programming and testing a client-server program with my other PC acting as server. Hope to hear your inputs.
Well that figure 30,000 milliseconds is 30 seconds as far as I’m aware and not 30 minutes; in any case it is too long if you happen to be connected.
The first thing I would suggest to you is XP SP3 (it has been out for a considerably long time), as of July 13th security updates ceased for XP unless you have SP3 installed. I would also suggest an increase in RAM as 512MB on XP is kind of low when you consider the other applications that you are running. With 1GB it would make a difference in performance across the complete computer.
The problem is a service not responding in a timely fashion is something that is hard to pin down, as it may be that the web shield is also waiting for something.
avast5 on my XP Pro system appears to be running less resources than with avast 4.8, its called progress ;D Not to mention, less and less people helping in these forums are using 4.8 so it doesn’t take long to forget the GUI and its settings. You could try checking the avast Settings, Troubleshooting, and check the delay avast services, option.
What other applications do you have running on boot ?
Ensure that only essential applications, system, security, etc. and ease the load on boot.
2002 hardware is okay and you have reasonable power, but as David says you need more than 512mb memory.
You can run easily on 512. But nowdays, for today’s software and connect, 1GB if not 2GB is mandatory.
especially if you want the system to carry a workload.
I find xp SP3 / up to date Windows and avast 5 are a good combo. Yr system will easily handle that.
As far as other applications are concerned, the only other significant program that runs on boot other than system and what else is my firewall (COMODO). It doesn’t take much to load either. I’ve tried disabling avast on start up and it boots up quite well. I’d say under a minute more or less. The only real time this PC ever takes a huge load is when i’m testing my program. It’s livable though as it doesn’t significantly slow down it’s performance. I am considering updating this one to avast 5. My other better PC is running on avast 5 after i installed XP SP3 on it after they ceased support for SP2 and it’s running quite well. I’m just concerned whether or not this old one would be able to handle it. I’ll give it a shot though after a few more tries and the problem still persists.
Just updated my vintage PC to avast5. Surprisingly, it fairs better in terms of performance and hardware usage. And here i was thinking it’d be a problem to my old PC. So far so good. Havent updated to SP3 yet but im thinking about it just to make sure. Thanks for the help dave and the rest!
