Brand new laptop computer (HP 17t-j000) with a clean build of Windows 8.1 Pro (purchased from Microsoft), installed on a relatively fast (Samsung 840 EVO) SSD, running under pretty hard-core specs:
- Operating system - Windows 8.1 64 Pro
- Memory - 16GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
- Hard drive - Samsung 840 EVO 250GB
- Graphics card - NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M Graphics with 2048MB of dedicated video memory
- Processor - 4th generation Intel Core. i7-4702MQ Processor (2.2GHz, 6MB L3 Cache)
The original build came with McAfee, which we unloaded in safe mode using the cleaner tool mentioned in the forums. We then rebooted the laptop and installed the latest build of Avast from the executable mentioned in the sticky topic: Avast! Premier 2014.9.0.2013.
What’s the problem? It takes Avast about five minutes to start up all of its services after signing into the machine. If Avast starts up first, it makes all other services immediately after login hang until it’s completed. If we tick off the “Load avast! services only after loading other system services” then everything else starts up swimmingly, and avast eventually gets around to starting up. This seems wrong. Something’s not right. Five minutes to start up anti-virus? Consistently? After every single reboot?
We’ve spent days (since Thursday 3/13) and late evenings, reading through the forums here, Googling “Avast Startup/slow down/login” you name it. So much reading, so much time wasted trying to troubleshoot this very simple problem.
We contacted Avast technical support, which unfortunately, tried to run a scanning application that gave a bunch of red flags (on a clean-built machine!) and wasn’t so conclusive. (Pro-tip: I have 37 years of working with computers under my belt. Dealing with this Avast tech support engineer on the phone was maddening - truly maddening.)
We’ve gone through all of the Settings/Troubleshooting, Settings/Update, tweaking this, fiddling with that. Right now, what we see is Avast takes five minutes to start-up after logging in, and that’s just not right. Is there anyone who can tell us anything aside from “Do a clean install!” We’ve done a clean install. Several times. About six or seven times, by my very tired count. We’ve used safe mode (a pain in 8.1, but we do what we do), we’ve used the cleaning utilities, we’ve downloaded and reformatted, recloned, and restored from image. C’mon, seriously, this is a brand new laptop, with a current O/S build, running off a super-fast SSD (five second boot time) and I’m very good at cleaning out all the cruft.
Please help?