After installing Avast Home, my playback is screwed up. Mp3/WMAs on the computer skip/scratch, Youtube videos skip/break/scratch; haven’t tried a DVD or CD yet, I’m afeared! The Windows sounds @ boot and shutdown are broken and scratchy, that Avast guy that tells me my virus is updated, does the same. Uninstalled Avast, no change. Updated drivers, no change. System Restore, no change- and won’t Restore to anyplace before Avast installation! Reinstalled Avast- no change. The AV works nicely, a little more draw of resources, but not bad, I like it except for screwing up my playback.
HP notebook dv5000 [has been GREAT for 15 mos, til Avast! Grr.] XP home, 512, AMDTurion64, ATIgraphics.
I installed, left default settings, scanned, looked the virus chest, etc; didn’t move or delete anything. Next time any sound occurred, it was screwed up.
nope, no headphones. It’s a Windows issue, I think, that somehow was brought on w/ Avast.
Now maybe this is important: when I ran my Directx diagnostics, when it gets to the screen with a white box moving around the black background, that white box moves intermittantly, on a rhythm, NOT smothly like it should. The troubleshotter there says no problems…I probably have to reinstall DirectX or something. But I thought I’d start here, in case any Avast users knew anything, since this started after my avast installation. Anymore ideas? thanks.
I am using VLC to watch avi’s and it was stuttering every few minutes. I checked task manager and noticed ash.exe (or similar) service was spiking the cpu usage up to 80% at exactly the same time the video was. I googled the file and it was an avast file. I am not in front of my own PC at the moment so the filename i’ve given is probably wrong. This only started after i reinstalled windows (XP PRO). It never happened before even though there is no software that is different. When i disabled avast the video was fine.
I’m having the same trouble, which seems new and I’ve been using avast! for months. When I listen to my music library in iTunes, frequently when it moves to a new song, about 10 seconds in the computer freezes up for a couple of seconds, causing the music to “skip” (presumably the sound card repeating its buffer). When it unfreezes, ashServ jumps up the Task Manager process list, often up to ~60% CPU usage, for one tick before dropping back down. Meanwhile, on the avast! control panel, the Scanned count jumps by about 9, ending with iTunesPrefs.xml.
I suspect that there’s some recently introduced bug that causes on-access scanning to hog the CPU much more than it used to in general, but people are noticing it most with music/video because it’s more noticeable if it causes the sound to skip.
madpro & jason, I think your problem is unrelated to that of seeyuh.
If there’s excessive CPU usage by ashServ.exe (and hence realtime stuff, such as audio/video playback, starts to skip), it is usually caused by the P2P Shield when you’re downloading large files (and avast is scanning them). Are you guys using e.g. uTorrent?
Now, seeyuh’s problem is different because the issue persists even if avast is completely uninstalled. And that makes it pretty strange. I have a suspicion about a hardware problem - but it’s not easy to prove. Seeyuh, can you move the mouse over the screen all the time, or it also skips? What about the Task Manager’s CPU usage chart - does it show any spikes? Or is there anything else/unusual that’s taking place when the audio skips?