Avast WEBforum
Other => General Topics => Topic started by: akama1 on January 26, 2012, 03:58:36 AM
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guys im just asking that why does avast take up sooo much hard drive space and is gradually increasing? when i first installed it... it was 169 mb and now its 250mb and that was a few months ago :/
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The space varies every day, according to the definitions. The old ones are cleaned up too, automatically. It's normal. Test it again in a couple of days (or a week).
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Just check your Defs folder, generally you will have the latest VPS version plus the previous one, these contain the full uncompressed (speeds access/scanning) virus definitions database, this is currently approx 70MB, so two of those would be 140MB.
On occasion you may see 3 versions there, but that should be cleaned out by the avast housekeeping.
In the greater scheme of things the whole avast folder is only 250MB (on mine also) a drop in the ocean with the mega-gigabyte drives. So if yours is 250MB then it looks like you have just two VPS sub-folders in the defs folder.
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Mine is 196mb with only one defs folder of 75.4. Every time I have checked, there has only been the active defs folder and no previous ones.
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Seriously, who cares these days? I was bothering about size when my HDD was 4GB in size more than a decade ago. These days, i didn't bother even when i had just a 128GB SSD in my computer. And with 2TB HDD, i don't care at all.
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When I got my first system that had a hard drive, that HDD was a massive 512MB, yes 512MB and basically the though was I would never fill it. Now that was a very long time ago, now my phone has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage space ;D
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Seriously, who cares these days? I was bothering about size when my HDD was 4GB in size more than a decade ago. These days, i didn't bother even when i had just a 128GB SSD in my computer. And with 2TB HDD, i don't care at all.
I remember when hard drives were 10MB and everybody said how in world are we going to fill those up. ;D But then I remembered you could fit a spreadsheet program on a floppy disk. The spreadsheet program was Microsoft Multiplan and it fit on a 5 1/4 floppy.
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I remember I had only 8 KB of RAM and a build-in cassette recorder ;D
Greetz, Red.
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My first system that even had a hard drive had one that was 8.4gb and I never filled more than half of it. My older laptop had 80gb and I filled about 70%. This one has 640gb and I'll never come close to filling it. I have World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Skyrim, and DiRT3 all installed and still haven't hit the 100gb mark.
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On occasion you may see 3 versions there, but that should be cleaned out by the avast housekeeping.
Hi!
I just controlled it and saw only 1 version. But what's on, if you have more than 3? Is it possible to delete the older one(s)?
HDW38
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@HDW38,
It is not necessary to manually clean anything. Avast takes care of it.
There are some rare cases where avast leaves some temporal files, but that's not about the definitions (which is what this topic is about).
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On occasion you may see 3 versions there, but that should be cleaned out by the avast housekeeping.
Hi!
I just controlled it and saw only 1 version. But what's on, if you have more than 3? Is it possible to delete the older one(s)?
HDW38
To start with there is little point in chasing smoke, as in what if you have. Those are bridges that are crossed when you come to them. Ore you will give yourself ulcers.
I have never seen more than three and as has been said avast does its own clean-up, trying to do anything manually is likely to fall foul of the avast self-defence module.
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It is not necessary to manually clean anything. Avast takes care of it.
There are some rare cases where avast leaves some temporal files, but that's not about the definitions (which is what this topic is about).
Hi!
I knew. But I had to ask this question!
Best regards.
HDW38
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Gosh, reminds me of days when I played DOOM lol
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Wolf 3d was my pain and i started in the commodore 64 and datasette days
(http://ergonomenon.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/commodore64.JPG)
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cool computer you have :)
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My first new computer was the Commodore Vic 20 ;D
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/83/Commodore_VIC_20_box.jpg/250px-Commodore_VIC_20_box.jpg)
Not quite as "powerful" but still a lot of fun.
Back then there wasn't much memory to take up since this thing came with a whopping
3 K of Ram.
No Antivirus either. :)
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Bob, i don't even think there was such a thing as virus files back them, as to even get on a BBS was a hard thing
For those of you to young to know what a BBS was
it was the old way we got onto the web (well not fully the web)
someone put in a pc with two to more modems on it and ran a bulliton board software that shared files and you dailed up to gain access.
(http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/10/modem.jpg)
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The good old days. But we're getting off topic.
About the amount of HD space used by avast, it's all relative to the
size of your HD. Mine is 2 TB so the space used by avast! is totally meaningless. ;D
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looking at all the points of folders on my 64bit system , it totals around 450meg combined from folders in user profile and program files folders on my system
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My system (and drive) are rather antique ... the physical drive is 40G of which 35 is the main (C:) partition and the rest is an "invisible" partition used by Restore-IT for its quasi-imaging function. Typically I've got about 70 percent free space, give or take 2 or 3 points, so 40G is fat for my current usage.
Anyway, back to topic -- on my drive, avast takes up 181 MB in Program Files and another 12 MB in Docs & Settings. (Probably also some drivers go into the system folders, but I didn't check there.) So even if I totally removed avast (and didn't replace it with something else), I wouldn't gain as much as 1 percent free space even on my small drive.
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I played around with some old 8080 8 bit systems I don't even remember how I acquired (probably from trash at the side of the road)but the first computer I actually bought and used was the original TRS-80 with it's 4k of RAM and the cassette deck for loading and saving software. I programmed some things on it in BASIC but I really got into things when I got a Coleco ADAM system that was color and had 64k RAM. I still have that system and programmed many things on it like utilities and games. Coleco never released any way to duplicate it's software so people had to figure that out for themselves. I programmed in BASIC, as well as some assembly and even a few machine language routines. ADAM was way ahead of it's time with a PnP system for it's peripherals. It was as proprietary as Apple though. The first internet capable machine I got in 1999 from a custom builder called NuTrend. It was pretty cutting edge at the time with a Pentium III 450mhz CPU, an ATI Rage Fury video card, 64 mb of RAM and a 8.4gb Hard drive. I started out with McAfee AV and switched to Norton after about a year. I was on dialup from 1999 to 2004 and never ran any kind of a firewall. The internet was a much safer place in those days.