For the past some months I have been having slow boot up and a lot of disk activity during bootup.
I had thought it was Thunderbird because I keep all my email, but I removed T-bird from the boot sequence and it was still slow. That caused me to check System Manager and it shows that AvastSvc.exe and Avast.setup are thrashing the disk and gobbling cpu. This is strange because my wife’s installation of Avast doesn’t seem to be doing this (at least to the extent of it being a noticeable delay).
What is Avast doing? I thought it might be the rootkit scan, then I saw that that scan is done some time later.
It’s really irritating and it clearly is related to my machine.
Running 7.0.1426 Avast (Paid), Definitions up to date.
WinXP Home SP3 up to date
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
ASUS A8N-E Motherboard
2 GM RAM
C:\ 232GB, 100 GB used (this is the disk being thrashed)
F:\ 700GB, 252 GB used (this is my backup disk)
Any other security installed on the system ? what was the previous AV and how did you remove it ? did you run the vendors removal tool to eliminate remnants ?
I noticed this too, but I removed a few other anti-malware programs I had and it sped up. I don’t think it’s avast!'s problem, I think it’s just conflicting with other programs.
If it still persists, that just might be how it is. A lot of the time anti-malware programs will slow down boot just because they are rooted in to protect your system.
Previous AV was McAfee and I used the vendor’s removal tool (and then salted the drive sectors). That was more than a year ago.
I don’t have any other AV installed that I know of. I have installed Malwarebytes, but it’s set to start when I ask for it, not automagically. I also have IObit’s Advanced System Care installed, and again have it disabled as a default.
Looking at my interface I see that I have all shields currently enabled and that WebShield, File System Shield, Network Shield and Behavior Shield are the only ones that indicate any activity. I will try deactivating them, then reactivating one by one. Report to come later.
All that is true, but it doesn’t explain why my wife’s system boots rapidly.
That was going to be the next step – though with the number of settings it’s going to be hard to verify.
Analysis of the shield settings seems to indicate that it is the File System Shield that is partially to blame, but even with all shields disabled Avast was thrashing the disk (as shown by the System Monitor, looking at reads and writes.) Naturally I am loathe to run without the File System Shield. I am currently rebooting my wife’s computer to do comparisons of activity.
I would like to thank the various people who have responded so far. More in just a bit.
Well it looks as if my wife’s avast! is set up the same as mine. She is, however on a more modern computer and running XP Pro, so results are not strictly comparable. Her File System Shield is hitting many more files than mine on bootup, too (about 280 vs my 140).
It may just mean that my comp is getting old and slow.
I have made changes to the setup in terms of allowing certain programs to evade the sandbox, etc. Since I haven’t recorded the changes I am resistant to doing a reset.
As I said, it is an annoyance, not a critical problem. Since there is no clear and easy (fix/correction of user error), I’ll live with it. Thanks for assistance.
Not sure if you have done this already, but lets see if your theory is correct. Why not uninstall avast!, and then restart twice, and see if it’s any faster?
I don’t need to do that, swrain. I was following the disk and cpu usage using the System Monitor and the only thing active in the disk-thrashing cycle was Avast. Besides, the idea of booting without AV in place gives me the screaming meemies.
The fact that the only thing active being avastSvc.exe (File System Shield) isn’t entirely correct as the avastSvc.exe doesn’t just scanning for no reason as it is an on-access scanner, so something is opening files, etc. causing avast to scan them.
The trick is trying to find what is responsible for that activity.
Some considerable time ago, my firewall also had an anti-spyware module, if that was enables that literally touched hundreds of files and that cause avast to scan the files it was opening.
In your case if the FSS is only scanning 140 files during boot, that is darn low and shouldn’t be giving your hard disk a thrashing. Do you happen to have the winXP indexing service running as that can be responsible for a lot of HD activity ?
Another area is MS Office if you have that, the Fast Find is another one that can give your HD a workout.
What I can’t understand is the hard disk activity when there are so few files scanned.
Something I would like you to try is to set Updates to Manual (avastUI, Settings, Updates), it is possible that if you have a broadband connection available early in the boot, avast could be checking for updates. Generally this would make itself noticed in the boot being a little slower, but I don’t know if hard disk activity would be great.
You will get a nag in the form of an ! exclamation mark over the avast tray icon this can be temporarily disabled, avastUI, Settings, Status Bar, unchecking the bottom three options relating to updates, see image, click to expand.
These can be reversed if it doesn’t resolve it; if it does resolve it there is something that can be done to delay the update check, allowing you to set those settings back as they were.
I hate mysteries especially in situations that should (!) be deterministic.
I do have a good solid DSL connection that is on all the time, but I did as you suggested to set update to manual and it made no difference in the boot behavior. (Other than the fact that the first time I tried to do it it didn’t take!)
When Avast does check for updates it does put a bit of a load on the system, but not too bad a one.
This is a picture of the Task Manager after opening firefox to write this message. It shows which processes have done the most disk access, I think.
The problems with the task manager is that these are cumulative figures and since the FSS is going to be scanning active files it is going to rack up figures. As I said truing to pin down what is responsible for the activity is not easy and the basic tool set in the task manager isn’t detailed enough.
