Avast has virtual bricked my laptop

[cutabovehost]

I have a nice Sony Viao with 6GB ram and 1.73GHZ i7 CPU.
It is running Windows 7 SP1.
I installed Avast Internet Security and waited till the time limit ran out on the trial and registered the program.

After I installed the license and rebooted ever since the laptop has been sluggish if it responds at all. I ran the repair tool first and rebooted. That helped a little but didn't fix things. Then I ran the Awsclear program for uninstalling everything. I rebooted and still no luck it is still sluggish to respond.

The CPU is 0% with Physical Memory at 24%
I hate to have to do a restore just to get the laptop back. Everything was running fine till I installed the license and rebooted.

[ady4um]

I don't know how the license file could affect the performance.

Do you have any pre-installed security tool? Have uninstalled any other antivirus? Did you run the respective removal utility for any other security tool that was pre-installed (or that you used before)? See http://singularlabs.com/uninstallers/security-software/ for a partial list.

After those steps, you could uninstall avast using "Add/Remove Programs". Download ANEW AIS TRIAL (latest stable version) from avast's website (NOT from the original email you received). Download ANEW aswclear from http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility. Reboot into Windows Safe Mode and run aswclear. Run it several times, one for each version of avast you ever installed or updated to.

Then reboot into Windows Normal Mode and install the new downloaded AIS TRIAL and reboot immediately after the installation process finishes.

After the reboot, let avast update itself and test it. Is it working as expected? Please use it and reboot a couple of additional times, so to be completely sure it continues to work correctly after several reboots. Only when it is all OK, add your license file again.

Please report back.

[cutabovehost]

I am working on doing a reinstall of the AIS as I type this.
For some reason AIS didn't have the Windows firewall or Windows Defender deactivated.
I did however already remove Norton Internet Security day one of doing the restore last time on the laptop.

I can tell right off the bat that the program did something to disabled port 80. The computer is able to connect to the LAN and retrieve files from the NAS, but not able to use a browser at all.

Thanks for the advice I am running the install now hope all does well.

[DavidR]

The avast firewall is designed to be compatible with the windows firewall so it doesn't disable it by default.

[ady4um]

Even if you didn't get to activate the pre-install security tools, you need to (must) uninstall AND run the respective removal utilities (use the link).

About Windows Firewall and Defender, AIS can work with both. I'm not getting into the discussion about if they are useful or not. I'm just pointing out that there is no problem in having AIS and Windows Firewall and Defender all active.

After installing AIS, you might want to review all firewall rules (of all firewalls installed (whether enabled or disabled) and delete the old rules. Old rules might seem to be correct, but updating programs can cause them to start blocking them. So by deleting the old relevant rules, the new ones are re-created. Note: you don't need to delete each and every old firewall rule; just the ones that are relevant to programs not working / not connecting as they should.

[cutabovehost]

I left the install running and it was running a security scan when I left. It has been going for 6 hours and still is running. I only have about a 500GB drive so we aren't talking about a very large drive. I just don't see how it can take that long. I actually only have about 50gb of data on the whole thing.

Still perplexed about what to do.

4:06PM EST 6 1/2 hours after the install. Just an update.
The laptop still will not allow FireFox or Google Chrome to start.

[ady4um]

I don't know why it would take so much time for you. If this is the first scan during the installation, so much scanning time is not so usual / common / normal IMHO.

"Something" could be conflicting with avast. It could be from a hardware issue, filesystem errors, previous antivirus or security tools (pre)installed before avast, remnants of other security tools,...

[cutabovehost]

I made a support ticket at least a few hours ago and not a response back yet.

Things are getting worse I started getting a Windows error about a failing drive.
Odd thing is that Speccy says that the drive is good.

[ady4um]

Speccy (or any other S.M.A.R.T. tool) can only provide you with certain values (which also depend on other settings, including enabling SMART in your BIOS). The values are just parameters, which can also be changed. The values can't tell you if a device is really OK. The values are some relative indication; a parameter.

A "failing" drive could mean filesystem errors (scandisk / checkdisk) or hardware ones (the surface of the HDD as one example, the cable and storage port as 2 additional examples, out of several possible).

Some potential malware could also be messin with your system (I'm not saying it actually is; I'm just mentioning that it is one of several possibilities).

It seems avast is not the real problem, but only "showing" you some behaviour / consequences of a deeper issue.

[RejZoR]

If your CPU is at 0% usage, it's something else. Sluggish performance usually comes if one of the processes is consuming all the CPU time.

I once had awful performance because i cloned the entire drive to some other and then replaced it. Everything worked much slower and avast! was also scanning much slower. Then i've formatted the drive and re-installed everything from scratch and all was well.