I updated Avast’s program functions 2 days ago to find out it’s up to 6.0. And for the following day, it worked better than perfectly. My past issues with it randomly sucking up 40-60% CPU power at boot up disappeared, and it seemed to take even less processing power than Avast 5.1.xxx. So I leave my computer on overnight and it updates its virus definitions.
When I come home from college today, I notice that my computer is now lagging considerably, and it shows everywhere. When I play games (the graphics get really choppy), when I watch videos (high quality videos become horribly out of sync due to lag, and low quality ones just look really choppy), when I hit F5 on the desktop (usually takes a fraction of a second and little to no CPU power, now it takes half a second and a considerable amount of CPU power), and the list goes on.
I rebooted my computer to the same effect, and I test various combinations of options (note - pretty much all of them), and even went as far as to shutting Avast off completely, with no improvements. I reboot again, thinking it may be just a fluke or some sort of system error that needs to be sorted out, but this time the 40-60% CPU power consumption issue is back. I uninstall Avast altogether via the utility on the main website, and the lag issue goes away completely.
Is there a known cause to this sort of problem, and possibly a solution? I love using Avast, it’s saved my PC from malicious attacks more times than I can remember, but I’ve had an almost equal amount of issues regarding its tendency to go haywire, in the form of some sort of resource eating demon from hell.
I am running Windows XP SP3, 2.66 GHz Dual Core processor, 2 gigs of RAM, Geforce 8800 GTS.
Since you have uninstalled Avast it would be hard to say what went wrong.
Please read this post which may (or may not) explain it. Sounds similar with the CPU usage. http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=74914.0
I have indeed read similar cases, but when my CPU usage goes up to 40-60%, it’s not visible in any of the processes. My System Idle Process is still reading 88-99%, yet I can hear my CPU fan going nuts. Stopping the Avast process doesn’t help either, I have to uninstall it completely, AND do a reboot before it goes back to normal.
I don’t recall Avast being in the middle of a systems scan either when I was flipping through the settings.
Please read David’s first post carefully in the link that I gave you. I don’t think he was able to see a process running either. This sounds like what has happened to many people since yesterday. Avast team is working on it.
At first I though what is this Bing Bong sound every now and then, I didn't twig what it was eventually I got fed up and did some rooting around. I checked the task manager and avastSvc.exe was running at 40-50% (image2) whilst it wasn't having a major impact on what I was doing.
David stated that he could visibly see AvastSvc.exe taking up CPU power. Mine wasn’t doing any of that.
If this coincides with my issue that began today though, then I’m glad to hear Avast is working on a solution.
I am having a similar issue as above. My computer’s performance has slowed considerably at start up. After booting windows, it frequently takes at least 1 - 2 minutes for a browser to launch. I use firefox, but it also occurs with internet explorer. have not tried chrome or other browsers.
Avast is running in the background, but it is not consuming major resources, although a good deal of memory is consumed. This did not occur before I installed Avast and I assume this is related.
I note that I had read about this before deciding to purchase but went ahead with it anyway - it has made me regret the purchase because my relatively new computer does not frequently function like one any more.
Well add me to this list. While using FSX, Avast was consuming more resources than FSX itself and had twice as many threads utilized. Good program gone bad maybe? Seems like every few years I need to switch to another antivirus program for this reason. Sometimes, I think the AV people think we run our PCs to run their programs. The reason I used AVAST for so long was because of it’s low overhead but it seems as if that has changed now.
Other than the fact that if your posting in this thread it means that you are using and older version of avast as the latest is 6.0.1125, plus the avast resource usage is extreemly low so maybe you have some other problem ? maybe you still have remnants of old av’s still in your system or a simple cace of just cleaning with ccleaner and run a defrag to clean and tidy up your system a bit.
