Problem with registration reminder for 4.8 Home edition on Win 98

I noticed a strange problem when I received the registration renewal message on my computer which uses version 4.8 Home edition. The red box would appear on the lower right of the screen telling me to click here to install the new version of the program and renew my registration.

When I would click on that box, it spent a long time downloading version 6 of the program and then nothing else happened. My system seemed to work normally until I tried to place the system into suspend mode. At that point the system was hung and would not do anything until I killed the Avast programs (Ashmaisv and Ashwebsv, I think). After that the system worked normally, although I could not restart Avast until I rebooted. After rebooting and updating the virus data, I would get the same message in the red box telling me to click here. When I would click on the red box, this whole process would be repeated.

After going through this cycle several times I checked Avast.com and realized that version 6 would not run on my system. I tried going through the process of manually updating the Avast registration and almost everything is back to normal now. The only thing that does not work is the “About avast!” option that appears after right clicking the blue circle on the task bar. The task appears in the task bar, but nothing is shown on the screen.

I like my old Windows 98 computer. It still works very well, and I have used it with Avast antivirus for many years with no major problems. Many thanks to Avast Software for continuing to provide a product that does not follow the destructive strategy of built-in obsolescence that dominates the computer industry.

Hi,
You need windows xp or greater now for running avast.

@LloydEwing,

What about a clean install of avast 4.8? I mean running the uninstall reboot into Windows Safe Mode, runinning the specific removal utility for avast 4.8 AND also for avast 6 (since you tried to install that version over the old one, but failed, so there may be remnants of version 6 too), and reinstall anew under Windows Normal Mode. Then reboot and register the Home Free again.

ady4um,
Thanks for your reply! That is good advice and I will do that if I have any other problem with my system. Since everything except the “About avast!” display window works fine, I would guess that the version 6 installs aborted before they changed anything important. I don’t care enough about the “About avast!” menu to reinstall the program if that is the only problem.

My purpose in reporting the registration reminder problem was to let other users (and Avast) know about the problem and that there is an easy work-around. I wasn’t really expecting to get a solution for the “About avast!” display, and I probably should have made that more clear in the original post.

(As for bobo, I wonder if… maybe he should be paying attention to the teacher instead of playing on the computer? :wink:

My only concern would be: what happens if what you see is the “about” issue, but maybe there are additional conflicts that you are not seeing?

Just as with other remnants of other security tools, or by having 2 resident security tools competing between each other, the actual security level is in fact lower than when using 1 resident security tool. Sometimes the conflicts manifest themselves, but sometimes they don’t, so the user is unaware of the conflict (and its consequences).

As long as you are confident there are no other conflicts, then I guess all is fine.

I also have an old Win98SE note pc as a second machine and keep its Avast 4.8 Home(free) VPS up-to-date for possible emmergency use of internet access. About two months(?) ago, just one time I also received similar notice to update to Avast 6 version. But knowing that the version 6 is not supported for Win98, I didn’t update to 6 but keep 4.8 version.
Even this 4.8 version, it takes long time to update VPS daily. If I click the “About Avast”, it takes time, too. Probably these matters are due to my particular problem of ram just 256MB and cpu 366MHz only.

According to LloydEwin’s infomation, I hope Avast team is checking whether the version 6 is available or not for Windows 98 and/or other old Windows!!!