Reason 1: I didn’t like the fact that the new version had no Pause for a full scan. It also didn’t say what it was doing.
Reason 2: It was very slow. Version 2017 was processing at about 100GB/hour. The 2016 was over twice that speed for the same scan.
The process, as described in other posts, was not that bad.
First, i noticed, that the previous configuration did not get respected. One of my configured automatic scans vanished during the upgrade.
So i reconfigured that one, only to find, it did no get picked up at the expected time. (Manual scan did work though). But since i cannot even be awake every time, the scan should start, i decided to go back to a recent backup (lost about 1 week).
Also, the updated version was interfering with some of my programs/games in an unsolicited way. Its the same thing everywhere: companies not only aquire (even priviledged) data from their customers, but also taking over our hardware (Avast has admin-priviledges and makes sure, it stays that way!) But the people responsible for software changes usually do not imagine the unexpected ways, in which people are using their PC’s, thus leading to problems with the free “one-size-fits-all” approach.
I went back to the 2016 version and checked the “manual updates” setting for now. But longer term, i am going to need an alternative, as this is not the first unpleasant surprise from this software for me!
I’m also looking for the previous version offline installer. I didn’t want to update yet because I read about all these bugs but when I was in the settings I accidentally hit the update button :-[
REASON 1 ANSWER:
Few of us Evangelists were already discussing the return of PAUSE button with avast! team and they are working on it. The request for it was rather huge so, it’ll return (I just can’t say when exactly). We also talked about additional statistics (like last scanned file, scan speed in MB/s etc), but we have no info on that yet. Hopefully it’ll return as well.
REASON 2 ANSWER:
Hm, there shouldn’t be any performance difference. In fact, new avast! 17 should be actually faster because it’s employing improved scanning mechanism. I also don’t seem to notice any difference on my 2 low end systems (one has AMD E-450, the other has Atom X5 Z8300). Not sure what could be the factor in your case. Hm.
If you go into “Run Full Virus Scan” settings (small gear button in the scan’s button), Performance section, select “Speed up scanning by using persistent cache”. This should significantly speed up the scanning while not really affecting scan or detection quality. What this setting does is just skipping of safe files (that have intact digital signature or are whitelisted by avast!). Real-time shields already use this by default, full system scan doesn’t for some reason. Hope this helps a bit.
I also have noticed that the new one freezes a lot, or just hangs.
When you go to select which browser’s history/cookies are removed there’s no back button so you’re stuck there and the “OK” button does nothing.
So it was a forced update to a broken program. Joy. >:(
I uninstalled Avast Free 2017 because user profiles under Windows XP become unaccessible.
My OS = Windows XPsp3-PoS.
At logon, all users get a message that "Windows cannot copy “\ourserver[username]\profilefolder\Application Data\AVAST Software\Avast\log to “c:\documents and settings[username]\application data\avast software\avast\log” / reason: access denied.”
Next, every user (even the admin who has no roaming profile) gets a message that windows cannot find the local profile and logs the user on with a temporary profile.
This problem appeared 2 days ago, after (auto-)update of Avast and this problem was immediately solved by de-installing Avast 2017.
I had this problem so far on 1 pc. Didn’t test any other pc’s yet.
Yes, all tests needs more time to finish. This new version seems slower in each aspect. So what’s the point make new version if old version is almost perfect? Just make one version and keep it updated, fix bugs and issues, we don’t need still new bugy versions. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
You can’t just update things, there comes times when you just have to redesign entire thing. And this was that moment. avast! 17 features most advanced tech from avast! and AVG combined. And with such massive updates, small bugs and glitches will appear. But be assured, avast! team is working hard fixing them. First batch of fixes has already been released today, that’s 2-3 days after the release! More will follow.