Avast and XP?

flossy_splodge

Wondered if anyone can throw any light on a problem.
Last Monday my neighbour was aware Avast had downloaded an automatic update. She has been unable to access the internet since.
We've been through BT to check their end and all's well.
I've checked everything else I can think of and ended up doing a system restore.
All is now well but I'm just wondering if there are any known problems or clashes with Avast.
She is on Windows XP and uses Firefox.
Thanks

giraffe69

One way to find out is to remove Avast and then install another free AV e.g. MSE to see if that resolves the problem. It will take a bit of time however. I recently had a problem with v9 of Avast and did this but my problem was grindingly slow speed not total failure to access and whether it was the problem or not it has been resolved, oh and MSE found two trojans that Avast did not.

flossy_splodge

Thanks for that.
I updated and then ran Malwarebytes and it found 77 infections! And this was with Avast on and running SAS!
Is there a need for a removal tool for Avast or can I do it through add/remove programs?:o

closed

Avast/malwarebytes/sas focus on different things

77 infections could be pup's/toolbars, not viruses, and there will be many infections avast will find that mse and malwarebytes won't, so it may not be a good idea to switch to a different AV on that basis - whilst there are occasional shortlived glitches with many AV products, the internet problem could be totally unconnected to avast, which is working for me without any issues, and presumably has updated since you system restored, and not produced any similar issues. Avast + manual scans with malwarebytes is a good combination. Avast beats MSE in terms of peformance and detection in every comparative test I've seen - eg last av comparatives, mse scored 92.2%, which every other Av product apart from one beat significantly as shown here

http://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php

the dotted line is MSE (av, not moneysavingexpert)

kandatoo

Have experienced major problems with Avast just lately on an old XP-based system, it grinds to a near-halt on startup and lasts for anything from 20-30 minutes. Avast appears to be updating something or other on startup. If you don't allow Avast to access the internet you may find the computer runs just fine. Malwarebytes confirms the machine is free of infections. Symantec Process Explorer appears to confirm, when it finally loads, that Avast is becoming the resource hog that Norton AV was once perceived to be. Ironically Norton's pretty good now from that viewpoint, but Avast appears to have become unusable on an older system. April 2014 sees Microsoft support for XP end and I wouldn't be too surprised to see antivirus software support for XP go the same way.

I'd be inclined to invest in a newer system if using the internet a lot as other things like video streaming can also be very demanding on an older processor.

esuhl

I've had a lot of problems with Avast on XP, Vista and 7 in the past few months. The PCs were freezing on start-up, or not running many start-up applications (including firewall and... I don't think Avast itself was starting properly -- allowing me to use the Internet without the firewall or AV in operation!).

A subsequent update seems to have resolved the problems with Vista and 7, but I gave up using an antivirus in XP and just set the firewall to block Internet access (since I don't need it on the affected machines).

closed

have been and continue to use it on everything 98 upwards, for a decade, and I can only recall one glitch (which slowed browsing) in that time, which was cured by turning off the webshield until the next update arrived, it's sometimes prudent to delay the update frequency slightly on all av's to avoid such problems, there has been quite a few instances of other AV's quarantining windows files and causing unbootable machines.

chunter

Yeh uninstall Avast and download the latest version and re-install.

They brought out a new release about a month/ 6 weeks ago which !!!!!!ed up the old version on some computers. New version it seems is quicker to load up.

albionrovers

Just as an aside, can she not test the internet using smartphone or tablet?

bod1467

Avast once caused an issue in blocking certain packet types which meant I couldn't play multiplayer COD4, but that was fixed quite quickly. (It may have been the same issue closed references).

Other than that I've been very happy with Avast for many many years.