I love Avast, and have been using it for years, recommending it to friends and family, and even strangers at the library where I volunteer. It works fairly well, seems to have a relatively low overhead (perceived), and I enjoy the wide array of versions with different levels of features. I use Premier, and anyone I support remotely also uses Premier (because I insist upon it). I used to use VNC, but Premier AccessAnywhere “just works” even through firewalls.
Having said all that, many of my friends and family are using Windows 8.1 (including me), and a few of them have experienced extreme slow-downs immediately after installing the latest version of Avast. Having read the forums, and learned of a few tips and tricks, I’m curious - am I doing something wrong? I mean, I should just be able to install Avast, and it should work just great.
Example: My friend bought a brand new tank of a computer - top of the line. I’m having her use a Samsung SSD, the laptop has a quad-core, with 16GB, discrete graphics card…it’s a super fast laptop. Boots in, what, six seconds or less? But after installing Avast, apps start to hang, login is slower, Task Manager, etc. The first time it happened, we weren’t sure. The second time, we did reboots and restore points, and tested after each step. Each time, things worked snappy until after Avast was installed.
Now what I’m seeing in the forums is that it’s only during automatic updates that it causes this odd behavior. Is this the case? Is there an official statement from Avast? Is someone looking into it? Is it an official bug, with a timeline for an official fix? Honestly, my anti-virus should never cause a “high-performance” system ($2,000 laptop) to grind to a halt.
I’m saying this, again, as a long-time vocal, highly-technical advocate of Avast, who wants to continue recommending this application.
Thanks!