When I run a thorough scan of my “C” drive with Avast Home Free on Win98SE, the Quick Launch icons vanish next to the Start button as well as in the Quick Launch list. I have to reboot the computer to get them back. Is there a way of fixing this? I am not that computer savvy so please make your reply easy to follow. Thanks.
Maybe some Windows98 problem while managing memory. Scanning is a very intensive file and system procedure, takes much resources (RAM and CPU) from the computer. It’s difficult to guess another explanation: avast does not move or change your system while it is scanning and does not find any virus. So, why is this happening? I bet on Windows98 poor memory management. Sorry, can’t help further.
Same problem here so that is two of us.
Rod
How much memory do each of you have? ???
Windows will “make icons disappear” if it runs low on memory. As tech mentioned above, scanning is very memory intense.
This has been reported in the past, on me also I think. I’ve had it happen a couple of times. Win98 doesn’t handle reources all that well. It just doesn’t like releasing memory that was used for something that isn’t running any more. This was discussed on a ms group years ago.
I have 256 megs of ram. A simple reboot after the scan seems to restore the icons. Just thought there might be a setting in the Avast .ini file or something. Thanks.
When I was using win98se I was always checking the system resources and if they got down to less than 20-25% I used to reboot so that I was in control rather than have any system resources crashes, etc.
I was also very strict in what I allowed to run on boot, thee are many applications that when you install them they want to run on boot, media players are a typical example, they don’t need to be running until you double click a media file. So audit your PC and only essential applications should run on boot, I always closed applications when I had done with them (even given what oldman said).
You could add another 256MB of RAM, it would help with some things but it should improve overall system response.
Dave R. I took your suggestion about limiting the applications, programs I allow to run at bootup, took out about half of them. Then I ran a thorough Avast scan, none of the icons next to the “Start” button went missing, the system resource factor seems to be the culprit. I will keep monitoring the “Start Up” file, make sure that I keep it slim. Thanks. Ken.
pixturesk, try Startup Delayer. This freeware controls the windows startup (Windows 98\Me\2k\XP\Vista) that does not follow a strict order.
Your welcome, I’m sure you will see a noticeable difference in your system response with less applications loaded.
I would still advise if you can some compatible RAM to add another 256MB, the more things that can run in memory the less has to be transferred back and forward to the swap file.
Here’s a link for startup entries under msconfig,startup tab
It’s a list of entries and what they belng to
http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php
Using this list, I took my old compaq, at startup, from 67% up to 87-93%, with mcafee, dialup and no firewall. With avast, highspeed and a firewall, 83-87%
I have been slow getting back to my emails. I have 130,484K memory as reported by DOS’s Mem utility. It is the max the system can handle. I have not been bothered by the problem for a while. I have been doing some cleaning as suggested by others here. I have not gotten around to the system tray (TSR’s) yet.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Rod
Your welcome, hopefully it will make a difference.
???
Talk of scanning, is it worth listing any other applications in the exclusions list of Avast! especialy other spyware programs including any parts of the program in windows>prefetch ? Or can viruses be also found within the same programs that are ment to detect them ?
Generally I would only exclude something which is likely to cause a problem and most (but not all) anti-spyware (AS) applications work well with avast. The only problem would be if that AS didn’t encrypt its signature files.
However, before selecting any AS application you should do your research, google, spywarewarrior.com, etc. as there are a number of rogue programs out there.