After the last major update, my computer became inoperable. I tried everything, but it would only get to the blue splash screen. I tried all the advise others gave me (thank you for it), but it did nothing. I even heard back from the Avast team, but they too couldn’t help. I had to take my computer in for servicing. They basically saved my data files, etc. and I had to completely re-install Windows.
To say the least I am not impressed with Avast. I realize the program was free, but not when it completely ruins your system. It cost me to get my system fixed. I came to the website today just to let others know that they should be very leery.
I won’t use it again.
I think that you should have put this together with your other thread as in isolation it would appear to be all avast’s fault when this is clearly not the case. http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=20747.0
I’m sorry that your experience wasn’t great and not the norm for avast!
But it was Avast’s fault. I now find out that numerous others had big problems with their last release. So my concern is that they are not testing their releases well enough before they tested them.
I just want to warn others that it happened to me and it can happen to you too.
Also the comment I made about chesting them was made BEFORE I knew AVAST’s update was faulty. So my comment was made without that knowledge.
I realize that you work for Avast so you have to defend them.
I am certain (as I can be) that DavidR is just a user of avast (as am I) and is not otherwise associated with avast.
I too regret that you had to go through this unpleasant and costly experience. I am certainly not going to go down the path of assigning fault.
However, I would suggest to you that the problem you experienced is certainly not one that many others have recorded here. The problems that occurred in a recent release, while they certainly irritated some, were certainly not major problems for the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of avast users and, as someone who chooses to participate in beta testing, far less than some problems I have seen with other products.
I know that does nothing to make up for the difficulties you have had to go through but may I just say I went through a similar experience (not with avast) some years ago and the one thing it taught me was to set up a recovery system. I now use two layers - for restoring my complete primary drive to any point in the last two weeks (or so) I use Goback (sadly now owned by Norton - so it may not endure too long) and I also use a disk imaging backup (in my case Acronis - but there are several choices out there). Both of these offer boot time recovery options.
Whatever your choice of antivirus may be I hope that you will consider giving yourself a better chance of recovering from a similar problem again.
I certainly don’t work for Alwil, as my signature indicates I use avast 4 Home.
As Alan mentions the problem you experienced doesn’t seem related to the avast .826 update issue that effected a very small percentage of avast users overall not that this lessened the problem for those it did effect. However this .826 update happened after your initial post on 24/4/2006.
[b]Version 4.7.826[/b] April 28, 2006
Sorry, my avast experience couldn’t be better… I’m just an user like the others…
Did you remember what were posted in the BSOD (blue screen)? Which error message?
Did you have any other antivirus in your computer? Which one?
If we can understand what happened, we could help the others… :-\
Moving suspect files to the chest is the only way to go. That way you can restore a file that’s been falsely identified as infected (false positive).
I don’t work for avast. But I was a volunteer moderator for McAfee’s help forum for many years. Just two months ago McAfee’s virus data base falsely identified an Excel file as a virus. It was a big problem for lots of customers who just deleted the file instead of quarantining it. One IT professional said he was responsible for 500 computers that now had their Excel progam inoperative. False positives can happen with any AV vendor.
No matter what AV product you decide on, there can and will be false postives from time to time. Always isolate, quarantine or move to chest any file reported as infected. Once a file is quarantined or in a chest, it can’t do any harm.
Good luck to you.
I don’t understand what happened here exactly. A faulty program update or false positive? First one could most probably be solved with safe mode and other one by reporting it to AV vendor (Alwil in this case) by supplying the sample.
RejZoR said:
I don't understand what happened here exactly.
In the original post newcybersol said:
After the last major update, my computer became inoperable. I tried everything, but it would only get to the blue splash screen. I tried all the advise others gave me (thank you for it), but it did nothing. I even heard back from the Avast team, but they too couldn't help.
DavidR provided a link to an earlier post from newcybersol:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=20747.0
Alan just wonders if RejZoR thinks his post might assist the originator.
I’m 64 year old, retired since 3 years, and using avast more than 4 years. I’d never troubles with avast and I’m happy with.
Yesterday, after my avast deleted a Virus in disk c, I found that i cound not open any progress!
avast doesn’t take autonomous decisions to delete files, rather it requires the user to decide on the action to take (or have set it up to do so) and the Recommended Action is normally ‘Move to Chest’ see image/s.
Since this is your first post I assume that you will be creating a New Topic so we can try and pin down the problem ?