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[JoshuaFH]

I'm a type of guy with a somewhat paranoid mindset. Anything that can happen that I can't see, prevent, or expect is a severe problem. Malware, or any form of virus is thus a major threat to me, so I recently downloaded Avast!, which I heard was very good.

However, having allowed the program to rummage through my harddrive and apparently remove whatever was infecting it at the time, I've encountered a new problem, my computer is running significantly slower now.

Ontop of that, when starting up my computer, instead of starting up, there's apparently a 50/50 chance of it instead going into purgatory, and absolutely refusing to listen to me. No matter what I do, no matter how long I wait, no matter what icons I click, the computer will not respond, leaving me with no choice but to do a hard reset on the computer, and hope it does better the next time.

This problem is VERY unexpected, and thus very aggravating, as ontop of being particular paranoid, I'm also fairly dense. I expect everything about a product to be explicitly stated, and I don't remember a single damn warning about this program tying my computer's shoelaces together, and I can't help but feel that some nerd is laughing at me this very moment, as I do not innately have the computer know-how to expect this sort of thing, nonetheless fix it.

Should I just get rid of Avast? Because the settings for telling it to quit aren't exactly intuitive, as I'm not sure what it's doing that's causing my computer to seize up like it's been doing.

[ChairmanPoo]

EDIT: Sorry, misread. I thought you had said Avira.

That's avguard. The resident shield. It does take quite a bit of resources. I managed to get to the disabling menu once, but decided against it because I've gotten a few unexpected malware threats. But yeah, it can be turned off.


If it's of any consolation, AVG in itīs last incarnation was far, far worse. In fact, I moved to avast because of this.

[Ohaeri]

Should I just get rid of Avast? Because the settings for telling it to quit aren't exactly intuitive, as I'm not sure what it's doing that's causing my computer to seize up like it's been doing.

Don't feel bad, I'm a computer geek and I'm not laughing at you.

Since it causes your computer to lock up sometimes, I would definitely get rid of it or disable it. Having to hard reset because of a program is never good.

If you're wanting the functionality that avguard offers, you might try TeaTimer. It comes with Spybot Search & Destroy. I don't know if that'll use too many resources or not because I'm running a custom-built rig right now with a lot of hardware, but it used to run just fine on my old dual 550 mHz machine.

Good luck.

[Yanlin]

Sounds to me like Avast! fucked something up in your system...

[Captain Hat]

Hmm... I only took a quick look at this, but here's what I recommend with Avast!


Start Menu
Run
Type msconfig
Go to the startup tab
Find TeaTimer
Uncheck it


Teatimer is a massive memory hog.

[Mr Tk]

I seen computers get stuffed by avast before. No idea why though.

You can go into safe mode and uninstall it, or to disable what ever needs to be disabled.

[JoshuaFH]

There is nothing of the sort on my computer captain hat, I turned off the gamestop game downloader thing, that I put on and was never able to figure out how to get off though.

I had avg 8.5 on my computer, and if that was taking up a lot of memory, I tried uninstalling that. Seems to be doing alright now, but if the problems persist, I'll be sure to bring it up.

Before that though, I tried getting rid of the web shield, but clicking the icon in the toolbar, and turning off the "provider", and I turned off the thing with shield in it.

I don't know if what I did was right though, it certainly feels like these programs expect you to already know how they work.

Also, I just downloaded this, isn't this just some sort of demo, and the program'll spontaneous shut down once the demo period is over?

[deadlycairn]

Nah, you just have to re-register it every year. As loing as its the home version, its always free.
Weird, I'm a big fan of Avast and have never had any issues. Norton and AVG on the other hand...

[SolarShado]

I've got Norton. It came with the computer, and has expired. The worst it's ever found is tracking cookies.

I'm carefull of what I download and use fairly strict firewall settings. Seems to work fine. 'Course I'm also behind a router with a NAT firewall, which I'm sure helps too.

[Rilder]

I've got Norton. It came with the computer, and has expired. The worst it's ever found is tracking cookies.

I'm carefull of what I download and use fairly strict firewall settings. Seems to work fine. 'Course I'm also behind a router with a NAT firewall, which I'm sure helps too.

You do know that norton is a virus?

[Pleeb]

I have Avast! too. It works perfect for me. You should only have one antivirus running at a time. More than one and they'll really clog up your resources. The resident shield is probably what's taking up so much power. You can disable it:
Right click Avast! icon in the bottom right tray
On-Access Protection Control
And you can pause or terminate it.
But then it will not catch infections before they happen.

You can also pause or terminate certain shields rather than the entire resident protection:
Right click Avast! icon in the bottom right tray
And click something in the pause or stop provider drop downs

If you're running on anything less than a Pentium 4, you'll probably experience a very severe slowdown no matter what.

[cowofdoom78963]

I dont even have anti-viruses running, they seem pretty useless other then their generic scan feature.

[SniHjen]

Don't got any antivira, but do have malwarebyte+HJT.

I use zonealarm.