I am running 4.8 pro, currently on a trial license. Until today I have been leaning heavy toward purchasing the product but I have some odd issues happening and I can only attribute it to the Avast scanner killing the performance of my system.
I have a Windows XP Pro X64 system, completely up to date with all windows updates. It is running on a Dell XPS M1710, 4GB mem, 32GB SSD. I store almost nothing on my local machine, everything i stored server side on my home server. I access this server from basically anywhere through SFTP / SSH. So the issue is nothing to do with my machine being bogged down with software or files. Drive is more than 70% free. Indexing service is not running.
The problem:
I boot into windows, boot process seems normal speed until Avast icon appears and starts to spin. HDD light then goes to always on and for about 10 minutes the machine is totally unusable, most of the time the mouse cursor will not even move. C/A/D also does nothing until 4-10 mins later when it finally “paints” onto the screen in a very jerky fashion. Once I wait a good while for this to stop I get my desktop and my icons show up. Now things are fine for a bit until i do anything network or disk intensive. Then the icon starts to spin again and I am stuck for about 4-10 minutes again while my machine is unusable. Unzip and unrar processes damn near kill the machine for 1/2 an hour.
I am pretty paranoid about getting infected on this machine, so i have it disconnected from the network after downloading the newest updates for Avast. I have ran a full system scan and found nothing, I ran it again as thorough and again nothing. So i ran Malware bytes anti malware, which found about 10 items (one of which was a trojan downloader) … why wasnt this caught by avast???
It should be on the avast 4 home/pro forum, which is possibly why it has gone unanswered. Hopefully one of the moderators will move it.
Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
What other security software do you have, that would be running on boot, anti-spyware, firewall, etc. ?
What is your connection method, dial-up or broadband/always on ?
If broadband it is possible that your connection gets established early (avast doesn’t establish the connection), because when that connection is present avast will check for updates and that too can be adding to the processor and memory usage.
Does your paranoia extend to increasing the sensitivity of the standard shield to High as that would force avast to scan all files and not just those most at risk ?
Without any information from the MBAM log it is impossible to say ?
There are some areas that MBAM checks (registry) that avast doesn’t, unless it detects spyware during on-access or on-demand scans, then it would look for associated registry entries for that file/s.
Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ? No this is a fresh install machine was just reloaded and this was the first software to go on it.
What other security software do you have, that would be running on boot, anti-spyware, firewall, etc. ? MalwareBytes is also installed,but not in resident mode, Windows Firewall is on. Nothing else.
What is your connection method, dial-up or broadband/always on ?
If broadband it is possible that your connection gets established early (avast doesn’t establish the connection), because when that connection is present avast will check for updates and that too can be adding to the processor and memory usage. Broadband internet with 208mb wireless. Connection does not happen until avast is already started in most cases.
Does your paranoia extend to increasing the sensitivity of the standard shield to High as that would force avast to scan all files and not just those most at risk ? I decreased to Standard to hopefully fix this issue, no real change though.
Without any information from the MBAM log it is impossible to say ? Where is that log, i will be happy to pull it for you.
You could delay the update check so everything has settled down.
You could edit the avast4.ini file:
[InetWD] section,
add the following line/s if it isn’t present (or edit if present), AlwaysConnectedWaitSeconds=120 and AssumeAlwaysConnected=1 (for broadband connections).
See example below, the figure is in seconds and you can set your own duration to wait before checking for updates. This allows time for a connection to be fully established.