Hi, I’m running Vista on a fairly new laptop. I changed from AVG to Avast a couple of days ago, but now my machine is hanging while I run a virus scan. I was originally running a thorough scan, with archive checking enabled, and the machine hung three times. Wondering if I was hitting decompression bombs I turned off archive scanning, but left it on thorough, same problem. One thing worth mentioning, I had looked at the settings for the P2P shield, and seen that uTorrent was excluded from scans, I checked the box to scan uTorrent, which was running at the time of all the crashes. A final note of relevance, despite being at least an hour into the scan each time, the progress bar on the scan showed only 1%.
Is any of this ringing any bells or throwing up red flags? I’d appreciate any help
I would say the first thing is to ensure that all remnants of AVg have gone after your uninstalling it.
AVG8 Remover, download tool from here, http://www.grisoft.com/ww.download-tools there is a 32bit and 64 bit windows version, ensure you use the correct one.
It’s already removed, there’s one registry entry with the Compatibility Class, unlikely to be interfering?
Based on that, I would say that utorrent may have a large impact on this. The reason it is unchecked by default is because of the way it works. It almost floods the system with very small files (all of which will get scanned) and these are then cobbled together when the download is complete.
This on its own can have a large impact on system performance, depending on your system CPU, RAM, etc. ?
If you then at the same time kick off a thorough scan, it could depending on your system spec it could bring it to its knees.
Thorough is also by its design very thorough (it scans all files) and perhaps a little overkill for routine use, were a Standard scan without archives should be adequate. Archive (zip, rar, etc.) files are by their nature are inert, you need to extract the files and then you have to run them to be a threat. Long before that happens avast’s Standard Shield should have scanned them and before an executable is run that is scanned.
I have only ever done a Through Scan with Archives once shortly after installation just to ensure a clean start state, but with XP for example avast will do a boot-time scan after installation if you select it, this I believe will be quicker and reasonably effective. Like everything in life things are a compromise.
I certainly wouldn’t leave my system on-line when doing a thorough scan and even less add to the load with a utorrent running in the background. It is possible I believe to have utorrent have your AV scan the finished download. This is the file for that, C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashQuick.exe.