I downloaded the update on my Windows 7x64 computer on Wednesday. It's a machine I really only use to watch streaming video to my TV. It's a very standard build with no frills and the only 'extras' are really Divx and Xvid (so very clean running.)
The thing had been running perfectly fine before I downloaded the update. After I did it I noticed that everything was slow and something was maxing out my processor at startup and random other times but I couldn't tell which specific task or service it was. Also, Firefox was having problems bringing up webpages, things like Google which is my home page were taking five minutes on my 350mbps connection. It was late, and I was tired so I just gave up and went to bed.
The next day I noticed Avast's browser plug-in feature that rates websites and sends streaming information back to the Cloud. Then I realized that those were causing some sort of problem with my network connection and the program itself was bogging my machine WAY down.
I thought "Fine, I'm done with this because I don't like the improvements" in the new version" I thought there was an uninstaller....there isn't, not that I noticed. I had to use the Program Manager to uninstall and when I went to uninstall the thing midway through it froze the system up. I don't mean just the uninstaller itself froze, the WHOLE system. No taskmanager, no mouse.....frozen, frozen.
I did a hard restart and now Avast is there but not in Program Manager as an option to remove. It's not in the Start Menu either. There is a file in Program Files for an older version of avast 5 but that doesn't help me. So, basically I ccouldn't do a clean uninstall and I couldn't shut the thing off! I couldn't disable the services from the Avast program itself because when I tried nothing happened. It just continued to do it's thing bogging my computer down and slowing up my network connection.
I ended up having to go into the System Config and registry to stop the thing from running on Startup. I'm not a noob when it comes to computers. I've worked in the ITS world for over 15 years but this thing was a nightmare and a headache even for me!
Thankfully, after I finally did get the thing to STOP running, everything worked perfectly fine! Network connection good, no slow down, processor not peaking out.
Please, include an uninstaller package, a way to turn the thing OFF completely, and an option to disable it on Startup! This thing seems to be having major issues with Windows 7, especially the 64x builds. I would not recommend ANYONE install it! Needless to say, I am not done with Avast!. You took a really great product and essentially turned it into something that is just as bad as the viruses it's supposed to be protecting against.
