I prefer Avast for Mac to all other programs because of the email scanning and site ratings, but I've had to uninstall it for the fourth or fifth time. I have an 8.1 aluminum 20" iMac from mid-2008 and run OS X 10.6.8. Avast will run beautifully for a while, but eventually it will have several days in a row of eating 90%+ of the CPU cycles even running in the background, and the temperature of my computer may jump 20 degrees or more thanks to the high CPU usage. When it's running like this, inactive memory will expand over a few minutes until I have almost no free memory left.
I can understand the rise in CPU temp because of the heavy use of CPU cycles, but why does it do this running in the background? And why does it max out inactive memory?
My previous iMac died because of overheating, and I don't want to lose this one, so I've switched to another product for now. I'd like to switch back to Avast, but this recurring problem worries me.