Within the last few months or so I started having problems with booting up which were unpredictable. At the very least booting up was very slow, often taking 5 minutes or more before my PC became usable, but at worst it would get so far through the boot process and then stop responding, the actual point of failure varying each time. I had no choice but to use the big red switch and reboot from scratch.
OK, so my PC is getting on a bit now, but I am running XP with 2MB RAM and a 2.6GHz processor so it's no slouch. and I load only the bare necessities at boot time. The problem was annoying rather than debilitating.
I have been reading threads like this one and thought I would try a couple of the suggestions :-
- I selected the option to load Avast after everything else and
- I edited the avast5.ini file to delay any updating for 240 seconds as suggested here:-
http://www.techsupportalert.com/freeware-forum/security/3137-avast-5-configuration-for-faster-start-up.htmlNow my PC boots up as it used to ... up and running within 30 seconds. I may be wrong but it does seem as if Avast is/was the cause of my booting problems. Is it because, as so often happens with applications like this, the whole package has been enhanced and tweaked so much that it is now, well, bloated?!
I used AVG for a long time but it gradually succumbed to the bloating syndrome. I then moved to Avast because it had some good write ups and it certainly was much quicker and more responsive. I do hope something can be done to prevent it going the same way as AVG.