Avast 8 Generating Massive .mdmp Files For Reasons Unknown

[plsrepli]

Hello all,

Just curious to see if anyone else is experiencing this issue. For example, last night, Avast 8 generated three large .mdmp files (250 Mbs per file) in rapid succession while my PC was sitting idle. I first noticed this anomaly, when I was doing a routine junk file cleaning of my PC (last week) and I found 1.5GBs worth of these files. Now, I understand that these files are supposed to indicate some sort of issue with one's PC; however, I can find nothing that would be coincident with the timestamps of these files. My Event Logs are spotless, my PC never hiccups, and I do not have any Malware resident on my PC. Unfortunately, I can't use the Win Debugger to read those dump files, so, at this point, I'm just trying to find out if anyone else is having this issue.

Thanks,

plsrepli

[DavidR]

It is an indication of a problem with avast not directly your system, though it could be related. That said it may not be that serious otherwise I would have expected an error dialogue window to be displayed.

Try a repair of avast:
XP - Add Remove programs, select 'avast! Anti-Virus,' click the Change/Remove button and select Repair, click next and follow.

Vista, win7 - Control Panel, Programs & Features, uninstall a program, select 'avast! Anti-Virus,' click the Uninstall/Change and select Repair, click next and follow.

You may need to reboot after the repair.

[plsrepli]

hello DavidR,

Thank you for your response and direction. I will try a clean uninstall and reinstall to see if that fixes the problem. Just for reference, when I did the last clean install, I opted for the minimum config and I unchecked that new security option (but I forgot what it was called). The reason I unchecked it was because I never saw it before and I have done several clean installations of Avast in the past 6 months. Also, I apologize for not giving my OS specs upfront but I'm running Win 8 x64. Anyway, thank you for your advice.

plsrepli

[DavidR]

You're welcome.

You will have noticed my instructions miss out win8 as I don't use it on either of my systems. Presumably it is the same as win7, it is just how you get to the control panel and programs and features from the Metro Modern Interface spit

[plsrepli]

You're welcome.

You will have noticed my instructions miss out win8 as I don't use it on either of my systems. Presumably it is the same as win7, it is just how you get to the control panel and programs and features from the Metro Modern Interface spit

Hi DavidR,

Yes, all the Win 7 options are still there; however, finding them is like going on an Easter Egg hunt and finding the same eggs that you found last year. Also, I agree that the Metro stuff is not for a seasoned Win 7 user; however, Start8 cured that for me! However, I must say that I really like Win 8 now because it is much faster than Win 7 and lighter on resources too! I also like the fact that Win 8 inherently recognizes SSDs as Solid State Devices and labels them as such in the defrag area. Of course I don't ever defrag an SSD! One other thing I noticed is that Win 8 seems to interact better with a UEFI bios installation than Win 7, and since I now boot to my desktop in 6 seconds, I would say that's also a major improvement over the Win 7 ready-boost option.

Cheers and thanks!

[DavidR]

off-topic
Whist the win8 quick boot/start is sited as a great feature, it is more like a hibernate as it doesn't shut down as such.

There have been a number of instances of problems with this feature in these forums for some reason or other has issues with the update process in avast. People expect avast to check for updates when they start their system, the problem being avast doesn't recognise that it has actually booted (because it hasn't). So it may need to wait for the update check interval to kick in.
/off-topic

[plsrepli]

Hi again DavidR,

off-topic
To be able to boot to your desktop in 6 seconds under Windows 8, you need a combination of options between Windows 8 and a standard UEFI bios. Specifically, fast boot must be enabled in Win 8 and there are 3 boot options in the UEFI bios as described below:
UEFI Normal Boot - Similar to Win 7 but somewhat faster
UEFI Fast Boot - Works in conjunction with the Win 8 fast boot option (This combo gives me the 6 second boot; no hibernate functionality required).
UEFI Super Fast Boot - Claims you can boot to the desktop in about 1 second; however, the drawback is that you have to leave power applied to your PC and you cannot access your bios during boot so you have to install a utility in Win 8 to tell your PC that you want to access your bios on the next reboot. Sorry I can't explain all the technical jargen but this seems closely related to a hibernate function if you ask me.

Now, Let's backtrack to the hibernate function in Windows 8. So, for a desktop, it doesn't make much sense to have it; however, it is required for the fast boot option. As you are aware, the hiberfil.sys file can be quite large and the more RAM you have installed, the larger it will be! However, you can shrink that file (from approximately 75% of the size of your RAM to approximately 50% of your RAM size). An example would be if you have 8GBs of RAM installed, you can expect that file to be about 6Gbs; however, you can shrink it to 4GBs if you don't use the real hibernate functionality.

OK, so people are having problems with the fast boot option all over the place and I can see where this could be an issue with a legacy bios installation. However, with UEFI, boot control is never passed to the Win 8 boot loader and you never see the Win 8 logo either. Also, I can assure you that I have never experienced an update failure related to my configuration as described. So, in summary, my specific configuration does not involve any hibernate functionality so Win 8 always allows Avast 8 to check for updates. However, it does seem like that the UEFI Super Fast Boot (1 second) option might not be a true reboot and that might explain why Avast does not query for updates.
/off-topic

Cheers