avast slowing down

I have been using avast for close to 1 month now and in the last few days it seems to take much longer to load. It is the only program I let launch when I boot windows xp. From the time the icon appears in the task tray till the time the red slash disappears it is over 30 seconds now. When I first installed it... it took mabey around 10 seconds or so. Any idea what might be causing this or how I can speed it up a bit?

 

When is the last time you have defragged, dewback?

 

Well I use disk keeper lite and defrag every other day or so. I use ad aware, spybot search and destroy, and spyware blaster. I run crap cleaner frequently and use reg seeker often. I have followed black vipers super tweaks and xp services configurations. Far as I can tell everything else is running fine... just seems to be a slow boot for avast which only began in the last 4 or 5 days. Also I noticed until avast is fully ready I can not access the internet... other programs will load during this time but not any funtion that requires net access ( cable connection).

 

Have you deleted your avast log files lately? Start tray>right click avast "softball" icon>select avast log viewer>delete any you want from there.

 

I tried deleting the log files, but it made no difference in load time. I had thought about reinstalling but I don't know. How is avg working for you star?

 

star17. Thinking of going back meself. Avast is far superior in the updates side of it but I think it is a bigger resource hog than AVG. Will have to do a detailed study to check it out as it relates to my W98SE laptop. Yahoo Messenger seems to hog a lot as well so a combination of ZA5, Avast and Yahoo Messenger sems to be too much for my old PC.

Will have to try various combinations of these 3, +AVG ( and different versions of same) and see where it leaves me. Never any problems with AVG either just less frequent updates, which some will suggest that frequent updates is the main reason for installing an AV program in the first place. Can't argue with that line of thinking but you gotta stick with what works best on your PC and evaluate any imitations before deciding on what to use. Bazza

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Dunno. Avast doesn't seem all that piggy to me. Sorry about the lack of sharpness. meg usage is .91/2.5/.24

 

Thanks for the input star... I have installed avg now and will see how it gos. The only thing I am leary of is they say they have updates atleast once a month... which sounds few and far between... hopefully it is more frequent than that.

 

I've been using avast for a while now, and never had
any problems, but avg is great too. I agree with star17,
use what's best for your computer and your needs.
As far as mem usage goes, taskmanger shows
that avast is taking ~18Mb while idle in the tray.

dew could have had two things besides a faulty
engine/need to defrag slowing down his comp:
1) since he has installed avast the are more files
on the computer and he has it set to scan on
boot-up.
2) avast is trying to update itself when it opens
and he's not online yet...so it waits until the
dl attempt time's out then finishes loading.

RJS

 

#1 is unlikely since the boot-time scan happens well before the desktop even loads.

But #2 is possible, and could easily be tested by setting updates from 'Automatic' to 'Manual'

 

Try using .gif or .png formats. They work many times better on screenshots. The image below is much sharper, and is only 13K (vs 75K for yours).

I run H+BDEV's AntiVir. The four processes are taking up about 10.5 MB, and only AVGUARD is actually the anti-virus element. AVGNT is the taskbar icon, AVSCHED32 is the scheduler, and AVWUPSRV is, AFAIK, the auto-update engine.

 

Thanks da chicken. I keep forgetting png.

 

Well, I did a project awhile back for a client that required about a hundred (well, probably 50 or 60) screen shots to make it easily understandable. I became a leet master of <Alt> + <PrtScrn>, paste as bitmap, decrease color depth to 8-bit (256 colors), save as bitmap, and then using "bmp2png -9 <bitmap>" to convert the image (I was on a machine that only had Paint and the SourceForge utilities I downloaded).

 

da chicken. Over here in OZ, png usually means Papua New Guinea. can you tell us unedicated about png format. How popular is it. What programs can read it? I gather bmp2png will convert bmp images. What about jpg and gif? Are there converters from those to png. Should I stop being so lazy and look up the answers for myself using google?

Always trying to improve/shrink screenshot images. Thanks. bazza

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Should I have started a new thread about png. Maybe I have confused/sidetracked the original avast issue. If so, I am sorry and will do better next time. Bazza