guys im just asking that why does avast take up sooo much hard drive space and is gradually increasing? when i first installed it… it was 169 mb and now its 250mb and that was a few months ago 
The space varies every day, according to the definitions. The old ones are cleaned up too, automatically. It’s normal. Test it again in a couple of days (or a week).
Just check your Defs folder, generally you will have the latest VPS version plus the previous one, these contain the full uncompressed (speeds access/scanning) virus definitions database, this is currently approx 70MB, so two of those would be 140MB.
On occasion you may see 3 versions there, but that should be cleaned out by the avast housekeeping.
In the greater scheme of things the whole avast folder is only 250MB (on mine also) a drop in the ocean with the mega-gigabyte drives. So if yours is 250MB then it looks like you have just two VPS sub-folders in the defs folder.
Mine is 196mb with only one defs folder of 75.4. Every time I have checked, there has only been the active defs folder and no previous ones.
Seriously, who cares these days? I was bothering about size when my HDD was 4GB in size more than a decade ago. These days, i didn’t bother even when i had just a 128GB SSD in my computer. And with 2TB HDD, i don’t care at all.
When I got my first system that had a hard drive, that HDD was a massive 512MB, yes 512MB and basically the though was I would never fill it. Now that was a very long time ago, now my phone has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage space ;D
I remember when hard drives were 10MB and everybody said how in world are we going to fill those up. ;D But then I remembered you could fit a spreadsheet program on a floppy disk. The spreadsheet program was Microsoft Multiplan and it fit on a 5 1/4 floppy.
I remember I had only 8 KB of RAM and a build-in cassette recorder ;D
Greetz, Red.
My first system that even had a hard drive had one that was 8.4gb and I never filled more than half of it. My older laptop had 80gb and I filled about 70%. This one has 640gb and I’ll never come close to filling it. I have World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Skyrim, and DiRT3 all installed and still haven’t hit the 100gb mark.
Hi!
I just controlled it and saw only 1 version. But what’s on, if you have more than 3? Is it possible to delete the older one(s)?
HDW38
@HDW38,
It is not necessary to manually clean anything. Avast takes care of it.
There are some rare cases where avast leaves some temporal files, but that’s not about the definitions (which is what this topic is about).
To start with there is little point in chasing smoke, as in what if you have. Those are bridges that are crossed when you come to them. Ore you will give yourself ulcers.
I have never seen more than three and as has been said avast does its own clean-up, trying to do anything manually is likely to fall foul of the avast self-defence module.
Hi!
I knew. But I had to ask this question!
Best regards.
HDW38
Gosh, reminds me of days when I played DOOM lol
Wolf 3d was my pain and i started in the commodore 64 and datasette days
http://ergonomenon.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/commodore64.JPG
cool computer you have 
My first new computer was the Commodore Vic 20 ;D
Not quite as “powerful” but still a lot of fun.
Back then there wasn’t much memory to take up since this thing came with a whopping
3 K of Ram.
No Antivirus either.
Bob, i don’t even think there was such a thing as virus files back them, as to even get on a BBS was a hard thing
For those of you to young to know what a BBS was
it was the old way we got onto the web (well not fully the web)
someone put in a pc with two to more modems on it and ran a bulliton board software that shared files and you dailed up to gain access.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/10/modem.jpg
The good old days. But we’re getting off topic.
About the amount of HD space used by avast, it’s all relative to the
size of your HD. Mine is 2 TB so the space used by avast! is totally meaningless. ;D
looking at all the points of folders on my 64bit system , it totals around 450meg combined from folders in user profile and program files folders on my system