My brother-in-law has a Windows XP machine running the free version of Avast. About a month ago he got red pop-up messages saying that his license had expired. I showed him how to apply for a new license, and he obtained one. It turns out that the new license key can only be applied from within a user account that has Administrator privileges. There is one such account on his machine, so we used that and applied the new license key.
But he is still getting the red “license expired” messages. He uses his own user account which does not have Administrator rights. My question is: does the license key have to be applied separately for every user account on the machine? Or is there some other explanation for this?
Any advice would be gratefully received. Thank you.
What version of avast are you using 4.8, 5.x or 6.0 ?
What XP version are you using Home or Pro ?
I don’t know how avast was installed then as that requires an administrator account to do that also.
The license key shouldn’t have to be applied to each account, it should be installed using an account with admin privileges or the administrator account, ideally the license should be entered from the same account that installed it.
He is using “avast! version 4.8 Home Edition - Free Antivirus”.
He is using Windows XP Home SP3 version.
There is just one account on his machine which has admin privileges.
I used that account to install Avast for him.
When he applied for a new license key about a month ago, he logged onto the same account and successfully applied the key by pressing the “License key…” button. Avast accepted the new key.
So we are puzzled as to why he is still getting messages saying “Your antivirus subscription has expired” etc. He gets these when using his normal XP account which does not have admin privileges. But that shouldn’t matter because you say that the license key does not have to be applied to each account, but just needs to be done once for the whole machine.
Any ideas? Perhaps he should apply for another key and try renewing again?
Avast 4.8 is currently waiting on someone turning off life support. Avast 5.0 came out over a year ago, 5.1 at the start of this year followed by the release of avast 6.0.1000 on the 23rd February this year.
So as you can see 4.8 is very long in the tooth and support for it could cease relatively soon, hence the notice to update. The only real reason not to update is if you had an old OS, win9.x or winME.
The 4.8 licensing is somewhat different to 5.0 and 6.0 and to be honest it is so long ago that I or anyone else used 4.8 the knowledge to help is limited. This isn’t so much an expired license, but support the program itself is likely to end soon and they are trying to get those that can update to do so now.
So the best recommendation is to do a clean install of avast 6.0.1000.
Download the latest version of avast, 6.0.1000 http://files.avast.com/iavs5x/setup_av_free_eng.exe (English only) and save it to your HDD, somewhere you can find it again (if you didn’t save your last download). Use that when you reinstall.
Download the avast! Uninstall Utility, aswClear5.exe find it here and save it to your HDD (it has uninstall tools for 4.8 also).
Now uninstall avast! (using add remove programs, if you can’t do that start from the next step), reboot.- 2. run the avast! Uninstall Utility for 4.8, once complete reboot.- 3. install the latest version, reboot.
The new version can be registered from the User Interface (avastUI), left click on the new avast tray icon (Orange), this opens the avastUI, select Maintenance, Registration, see below.