I am ecstatic to be a new user of Avast AV! I had spent the last month trying to get McAfee VirusScan to work following its recent disastrous update, which has left it (still to this date) essentially incompatible with the W98 OS. Finally, in disgust, I uninstalled McAfee VirusScan AND Spamkiller - which is another story of a different ruinous update (just read the McAfee forums) - leaving only its Firewall, which hasn’t caused problems YET. I then downloaded/installed Avast Home Edition and, after a quick WinRescue98 registry repair, have now seen my old Gateway 400 MHz, Pentium II desktop speed along without a hitch, faster than it has in ages! What a relief!
I don’t think I could bear another round of crashes and endless troubleshooting for any reason, so I’d like to check a couple of things out right away before I make any mistakes:
I have TrojanHunter 4 installed but not running; I have tended not to use its background scanner, TrojanGuard, because I found it seriously conflicted (i.e., immediate freezes and crashes, within moments of booting it up) with McAfee AV. But now, running Avast AV, I tried its LiveUpdate function and then also booted up its main screen, all without a hitch or - so far - any apparent problem. IS it safe or advisable to run TrojanHunter 4 while also running Avast AV? It would be ideal if I could, giving me a second full-time layer of protection… If not, exactly what steps would I take to temporarily disable whichever Avast functions might conflict before booting up TrojanHunter and doing an occasional system scan with it?
One other question is about the Avast WebScanner. It seems to drain too much of my system’s resources, leading to one very unwelcome crash yesterday after I had tried it for a few minutes. Even though I have a pretty fast DSL, I immediately noticed very long delays in loading webpages, and then the computer crashed (which happened when I tried to use some other application while surfing).
Is my meager 400 MHz processor speed, running W98, potentially insufficient to run WebScanner (which I then disabled, also returning my POP3 email account to a non-proxy setting, and since then, everything’s been running perfectly)? If necessary, I can certainly live without it - I have until now, using ^$%#* McAfee. (Using mainly just the Avast resident scanner and email scanner, both breezing along without causing a single crash, is plenty good enough for me.) But I’d like to know if you think there might be anything more going on, perhaps a wrong setting somewhere to account for the WebScanner issue, above and beyond my creaky old system.
Thanks for your help, and thanks for providing a great product!