I have two hard drives. I have a separate clean Windows installation on the spare drive. It has 4.8 installed and it seems to run fine.
My current Windows install on my primary drive (XP 5.1/SP2) is a few months old. I do not have time to be re-installing Windows and backing up 100GB of files every few months just to allow buggy software to run. I have seen many complaints both here and elsewhere about 4.8 problems.
I will use 4.7 for now and will search for a robust replacement that will not cause my computer to lock up or fail to restart.
Or I will wait until the Avast team finds a fix for these issues. This situation is something I have seen since the 1980s: a company is very innovative and successful in the beginning, but as they grow they sometimes reach too far and wind up going backwards. I have seen it happen to some very large and successful companies: Word Perfect, Novell/Corel, Intuit, Peter Norton, and of course Microsoft (Vista, anyone?).
However, I have to say that your experience is not the same as mine and my IT experience is certainly no less than yours.
I am not doubting that your configuration is exhibiting problems but my experience and that of the folks I support is that avast 4.8 is working just fine on WinXP and Vista systems alike.
While reverting to 4.7 may well be a solution for now the day will surely come when avast will mandate the move to 4.8 to maintain the VPS updates. When that does happen then I hope that the problem you are encountering has been fixed by someone else’s efforts or you will be having to look quickly for an alternative.
In the meantime you could try to assist yourself and the community as a whole by working with the folks here and the avast team to try to determine the cause of the problems affecting you now and, hopefully, solve them. I can understand the pressures that weigh on many day to day, but the chances are that if you have problems with this product you may well face them again - sooner or later - with another product.
Nevertheless, always respecting that it is your system and your choice.
Not running OA, are you? I had a similar problem on May 20 with the update. I nailed it down to Online Armor not allowing the computer to get into windows to ask if I would allow the new version of Avast to start. It appears that security programs are trying to start so early in boot up, that they can cause issues.
A work around would be to uninstall, then re-install OA after Avast loads, or remembering to put OA in learning mode. But this would have been a problem when the next update came along.
If you have some sort of HIPS running, that may be the problem.
Please, go to folder \windows\minidump and send the newest (recent) .mdmp files for analysis. There is also C:\Windows\Memory.dmp file.
Better if you can compress (zip) them and add some information about the BSOD and the link for this thread.
Alanrf: I certainly appreciate your viewpoint and respect your knowledge and advice; I simply do not have time to be a a part of the research base. It’s a free program (though I’ll bet the Pro version would do the same thing) so I can’t complain. On the other hand I used Norton Utilities and Norton antivirus since the DOS days. When NU became bloated and overloaded with features I stopped using it, and finally in 2006 I ceased paying for Norton Antivirus because of the problems it caused.
I realize the limitations of my current setup, but I’m betting that a solution will be found or I’ll find something else just as good, even if I have to pay for it.
Colin P: No I’m not using OA, I have Spybot and AdAware. I noticed in my System Restore that several of the changed files had something to do with Firefox, which I prefer to IE despite several glaring defects.
Tech: I’d like to do that; I’m a business owner and always appreciate sincere feedback, whether positive or negative. Will try to get to it in the next few days.
Tech: sorry about that…I’m not new to pc’s but am to replying to forum posts…if that makes any sense : anyway yes my problems are identical to ‘Dannyboy’s’. at first I thought that it was M$'s latest ‘critical’ update but I was wrong. On reboot (which was numerous times) allways the BSOD. Just by luck windows opened up with the guest account and I saw the avast.setup in Task Manager, which is common, but it wasn’t showing any cpu usage when I know it does… Removed the AV while in safe mode and pc booted fine.
system is: home built/xp pro sp2/1 gig ram/amd athlon 2800+ (not overclocked)/gigabyte mb/dsl connection.
If I go back to 4.7 then I’ll have to ‘untick’ the automatic options so the program won’t update to the newest version, which might be the way to go for now untill the bugs are worked out. I’ve been using avast for a few years and also install it on pc’s I work on (gulp) and this is ever the first time anything has gone wrong. (I really don’t want to resort to…shudder…avg’s ???)
kevin
How did you get 4.8, did you upgrade from 4.7?
Do you have any other antivirus in this machine before avast?
Can you post the BSOD error number here? (Windows Events should have kept some info about it).
actually the program (4.7) upgraded to 4.8 on it’s own and I have had no other AV’s installed on the pc.
Now the bsod I’m describing is actually the ‘Welcome’/loading my settings screen. The freeze happenes AFTER I signed in with my password. There was no cpu activity at the time as the cpu light didn’t flicker or anything :
the event log shows a bunch of events around the time I think when this all happened
event log #'s 6005,6006,6009
DCOM #'s 10010
Service control Manager #'s 7035, 7036
nvatabus # 2
I hope these are what your asking ???
kevin
anyway yes my problems are identical to ‘Dannyboy’s’. at first I thought that it was M$'s latest ‘critical’ update but I was wrong. On reboot (which was numerous times) allways the BSOD. Just by luck windows opened up with the guest account and I saw the avast.setup in Task Manager, which is common, but it wasn’t showing any cpu usage when I know it does… Removed the AV while in safe mode and pc booted fine.