Hi,
First off, I want to say that I've been very satisfied with Avast for the last two years and have recommended it all around, singing its praises.
My computer is a Pentium 4 laptop, with 2800 processor and 512 Ram. Sytem is Windows XP with SP 2.
Now... It might just be a coincidence, but since the program was updated last (a week or two ago), my boot time has gone up considerably - I've timed the process and on average it takes 3 minutes 30 secs for the desktop icons to appear, than another minute for the task bar, quick launch icons to show up, and another 3 to 4 minutes for the resident scan to finish its tests. I've done clean boots using msconfig and that brought the process down to a little over two minutes. I've also tested with only Avast not launching on boot, and the boot time was around 3 minutes 30 - even this seems long to me.
First thing I did when I noticed there was a slowdown on boot, was to do a - what's it called in English ( I have the French version) - anyways pre Windows launch complete virus scan. That came up with two trojans - sorry I don't have the details. I was a little surprised. Then I did a Trend micro online scan, and that one came up with a something like four trojans - couldn't save the log file of that ! and a bunch of spywares and graywares. I cleaned my system and rebooted, and that reduced considerably the boot process' length - the above clockings though were done afterwards.
Then I noticed that the resident scan was going through anywhere from 800 to 1000 files upon booting. I must say I never paid attention to this before - maybe this was always the case. As far as I know, the resident scan only checks whatever is launched, right? Upon looking closer, I noticed that the scan was going through just about every program (exe) in my programs file. That seemed a little odd. So I deleted all my quick launch shortcuts and emptied the startup programs menu - thinking that the shortcuts being launched were causing Avast to check the exe files. I moved the whole lot of them to a file on my harddrive. Didn't do a darn thing. So I threw that folder away. It didn't change anything.
Googling just about everything I could think of, I found some articles on Prefetch files (pf). What the heck, I emptied that folder and changed the settings to boot launch ( that's 2 in the registry). It sured downsized the folder, but didn't speed up the boot process.
So I uninstalled Avast, and reinstalled it again - since it had seemed to miss quite a few trojans and stuff, I figured it might not have been correctly installed. Nothing doing.
Going through the forum I remembered seeing something about firewall (mine is Kerio) plugins causing Avast to run though a great number of files. I looked into that, but didn't see anything - but I must admit that I don't know much about computers in genral and firewalls in particular.
As I've said, the boot time with Avast off already seems long to me - but then again I might just be getting impatient - so the slow down might not be caused by Avast
alone. Still the boot resident scanning seems outrageous from my common sense point of view.
Anyways, anything suggestion would be appreciated.
Last thing. It seems that the viral signature data base was being updated sometimes twice a day until a couple of weeks ago - I was getting that sexy announcement all the time. The updates aren't as frequent now, and I sort of miss that voice (I've been single for a while). It is a Christmas New Year's Eve thing?
Thanks
MartinC
