Hello forumers,
First post, felt compelled to share my story.
This post would mostly be directed towards the fine people who work at Avast, but I am curious if others are having similar problems with the newly released version 7.
First, to the ‘meat’ of my complaint, so to speak. The most current version of Avast has caused BSOD’s to occur on my computer, my wife’s computer, and my father-in-law’s computer whom I convinced to switch to Avast a couple weeks prior (poor timing). Always the same STOP codes (1000008e, c0000005). Further digging in the minidump files generated had flagged an Avast system file as the culprit. They all had the most current version of Avast, have Windows XP SP3, and have no infections or other problems. I’ve removed Avast from each machine as the BSOD’s can be rather frequent, and am looking into what could be done to remedy the situation. Obviously I could just switch to another AV program, but I’ve had Avast for many years and have been happy up until now. So, I am most interested in knowing if a fix will be available soon, as I’d like to give it another try (at least on my own computer, until I decide it’s good to go, or not).
Other things I noticed since the update to v7 (other than the BSOD, which happened to me last out of the 3 computers mentioned) that I’m not too keen on. On my computer, I noticed that the Avast service would intermittently use up between 35% and 55% of CPU for no apparent reason. This might happen once a day or ten times in an hour, I couldn’t find much correlation as to when or why it would occur. During one of these slowdown sessions, I went ahead and closed everything I was doing one at a time to try and see if it made a difference, but the lag spikes continued minutes after everything was closed. Processes running in the background were the same number as always (with everything closed, my computer has exactly 34 running processes). The other two computers may have had similar problems, but I don’t use them so can’t say for sure.
I also noticed on my father-in-laws computer, that many of his installed programs would ask to open in sandbox mode. Ones that I can remember would be Office '97 (very old, I know, so I didn’t think much of it) and Corel X5 (much newer). Any of the exe’s related to those programs would ask to be opened in sandbox mode (like Office Word, Excel, Corel Paint, Draw). Not a big issue since I can just tell it to not open in sandbox mode via the handy checkbox, but let me tell you, it confused the heck out of my father-in-law until I fixed it for him.
Also maybe worth noting, but since I’ve removed Avast from my computer a couple hours ago, Windows suddenly has 13 updates for me. Windows updates have been happily chugging along automatically on my machine since it’s creation about 4 years ago, so to see a large chunk of new updates being automatically handed to me is unusual.
So, there’s my rant. Please don’t take this as bashing Avast as a program or toward the people who make it, as that’s not what I intended. If I did not like Avast, I could have simply switched to a new AV and never said a word. I’d rather dig into the issue a bit more, see if others are having similar problems, and share this story in hopes it may help the developers.
Thanks for reading this.
