Hi everyone,
I’m new to Avast, just installed it a couple of weeks ago. So far I’ve been very impressed by the program, but I’ve run into something I’m not sure how to deal with.
System Specs: AMD Athlon XP 2400+, MMX, 512MB RAM, running WinXp Home. I’m using Avast Home v. 4.7.892, VPS version 0701-0. Windows Firewall is active, and I use a Netgear RP114 router. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for email, although my girlfriend also checks both Hotmail and Gmail online (webmail).
About a week ago, my girlfriend opened her Hotmail account, which has apparently changed recently so that emails from people in your friends list opens automatically in a viewer of some sort. She’s not very computer literate, so she could only give me basic info, but she said the email that opened looked like it was blank, with the header “Merry Christmas!” or something similar. She said the computer immediately started “acting funny”, but couldn’t give me much more detail. She also said that the same friend had sent the same email at least 20 times, and I’ve taught her enough that she wouldn’t have opened the email manually or opened any attachments, as that seemed suspicious to her. Yay for Microsoft. grrrrr…
Anyways, since then I’ve been experiencing reduced connectivity. Sometimes I can’t get online at all, other times pages will start to load and then stop. I also sometimes get an error when opening pages, saying “connection was reset” or “Connection to server has timed out”. when I check my email, I usually have to try several times before I can connect to the server and download my emails. Also, when I delete an email, it freezes up for about 3 or 4 seconds before removing the email and allowing me to continue. When trying to play online games like Warrock or Counterstrike, I have to try to connect to servers again and again, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes, before I get a connection. When I do get connected, my ping is horrendous, the lag is terrible, and there’s sometimes a five-second lag between when I shoot someone and when they die. My room-mate’s computer is also connected to the same router, and when I look at it, I see his link/act light flashing continuously, while mine stays solid, only flashing briefly every 9 seconds or so. He claims he’s having no problems at all, so I know it’s not my ISP.
I ran a Thorough scan, which took almost a full 24 hours to scan 150GB of data. It came up with nothing. Anyone hear of anything like this before? Your help would be much appreciated!
~OftnCnfusd
