On Sunday, I had to replace a client’s Norton AntiVirus CE on an old Dell Optiplex GX260 PC with an Intel Pentium 4/IV Prescott CPU, 512 MB of RAM, IDE Maxtor HDD, and an old updated Windows 2000 SP4 (IE6) due to its slowness (much faster without it). After researching and being told to try the latest Avast free/personal, I installed it and it seems to mostly work. However, there were a few problems.
I noticed AvastUI.exe likes to hog CPU (50% on hyperthreading Intel Pentium 4/IV Prescott CPU) when I access real-time shields option in Avast GUI program. I do see graphs gets updated. I can’t exit or do much in Avast when this happen. I can’t even kill it. Windows 2000 is almost very slow too. I have to wait a long time after clicking close/exit on it. I did not see any intense disk access. What’s up with that?
I did also notice updating showed avast.setup hogging a little, but not horrible. I assume that’s normal on a slow old PC.
I believe the PC has the latest drivers, but it’s very old from early 2000s. Are there fixes for these CPU issues?
The fix would be to use the Norton Removal Tool I’d say… and after that, do manual digging and uninstalling their left-over drivers which get ignored by the removal tool as well.
Well, not really something we could solve here. The policy w/ “enterprise” products has always been that their removal tools are super-secret and available on-demand only after providing a proof of valid license and wasting ages w/ Symantec technical support. I could give you a “warez” version of SEP removal tool, but for outdated stuff such as 7.x of their corporate client, sorry, no idea. One thing I’m sure about is that their standard uninstall procedure fails miserably, causing whole lot of after-effects.
Thanks. Now come come the slow down only happens during real-time shields screens though? Is the graph part doing something intensive to majorly slow down?
ActiveX of Flash? What the? I think that’s the problem. I know Flash v10 is choppy in Web browsers on that old PC due to onboard Intel video chipset. Is there a way to disable the graphs or use lower quality? Or slow down the monitoring?
??? >:( I have the exact same problem on a customer’s PC. Windows XP Home SP3…using S3 video drivers onboard video. Every graph causes CPU 100% and only when open. I have to close each graph to do anything at all. Is Avast only doing this on this type of hardware? It’s basically un-usable. This happened when the registration window was open also…
It seems Avast has problems with graphic rendering on low-end/old onboard video chipsets. I don’t recall having problems with the free version’s registration (the one to enter an e-mail address).
Have any of those with this problem enabled the avast! Settings, Basic, Appearance, Use special graphics effects ?
As it says this is ‘nicer, but may slow down performance on some systems.’
I don’t see any way of disabling the graphs, but surely this wouldn’t matter if the avastUI remains minimised or on one of the options that doesn’t display a graph, e.g. Summary (not statistics), Scan Computer or Maintenance sections.
Good idea, I had the same thought and turning off “special graphics effects” was the 1st thing I tried to no avail. If anyone on the development side of Avast reads this thread, can you answer a couple of questions?
What does Avast use to render these graphs? DirectX, OpenGL, Windows GDI? or some form of ActiveX/Flash like another thread mentioned?
Can I somehow update this rendering platform? Like getting the latest .NET framework or something?
I would rather not have to uninstall Avast! and use something else.
The statistical graphs use flash, though I don’t believe that is what is meant by the “special graphics effects” as the statistical graphs still work without that setting enabled I believe.
