I’ve been having trouble with my WiFi lately, it’s been randomly shutting down. I thought maybe my WiFi module was starting to die, and I was thinking of replacing it. But I figured it could be a virus or something similar that is affecting it too. So today I was trying to use a special scanner to do a deep scan of my system, and I had to shut off Avast in order for this other scanner to launch. And guess what, ever since Avast has been shut off, my WiFi has stayed up. It seems to be connected to Avast.
With Avast running, my WiFi gets disconnected after only a few minutes when I power up my system, to the point that if I try to disable the WiFi adapter from the control panel->device manager my whole computer gets blocked up. But the only way to get the WiFi up again is to try to disable the adapter; when the notebook then freezes I have to force shutdown by holding the power button. Then when my system starts again I can re-enable my adapter and I have WiFi again, for a few minutes until the adapter deactivates again.
Unless I shut off Avast that is, this is todays discovery. Could there be a virus that is targeting Avast itself?
Well maybe it was just a coincidence that my WiFi connection lasted a little longer when I disabled Avast in order to let the other scanner do it’s job. I’m thinking it’s more of a hardware problem, because even if I boot off of a live Linux my WiFi adapter shuts down after a few minutes. So it’s not a virus or a software problem I guess.