Avast free 2015 Not Updating

[REDACTED]

Hello everyone.

On the 27th June (2016) the red Windows alert/safety centre shield (WIndows XP) appeared in my notification area saying that Avast was reporting it 'may not be up to date'; I tried to manually update the virus definitions from within the program, but whilst it indicated updating had begun nothing was happening. I did also try to update the program with the same result. No activity was evident in the task manager during these attempted updates.

So, on the 28th I manually downloaded from the Avast website the latest virus definitions and the red shield went away: apparently Avast was no longer reporting it 'may not be up to date'. I then tried to update the definitions manually again from the program; normally, if the defintions are already up to date - as apparently now they were - the update process begins and ends about 5-10 seconds later with a message something like, 'YOUR VIRUS DEFINITIONS ARE UP TO DATE', but like before the update process began and immediately froze. Also, when I see instup.exe (avast installer) in the task manager it is appearing for only a few seconds, whilst at the same time - and I don't know if this is related to the problem - the avdump process (sorry did not catch complete name) appears for a second too and I don't recall seeing this, at least regularly, until recently and I wondered whether perhaps this was cancelling the update process; previously instup.exe remained in the taskmanager for a few minutes. One other thing, I have seen no pop-up for a long time reporting that virus definitions have been updated: I get only adverts now, but in avast's settings those former pop-up's are set to appear. I wondered whether the problem might be with Avast's servers rather than the program itself: possibility?

I did yesterday see in the forum that someone else had been having a similar problem recently, but could not find the entry this morning. Has anyone else been having this problem recently? I am using Avast free 2015, program version 10.4.2233.

Thanks.

[Eddy]

Perform a clean installation of the latest avast version.
https://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility
https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=187663.0

[patclash]

Hi ,
if you have a pc with a CPU that doesn't support SSE2, see this :
https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=187680.0

[REDACTED]

Hi guys, thanks for replying.

(Apologies if the quotes don't appear quite correctly; I have never used them before).

Eddy, in the thread referred to by patclash below you said:

It only works if the CPU supports the SSE-2 instruction set.
The entire 2016.x version series will not work if a system doesn't support it.

By contrast, when in the same thread the questioner inferred from various replies that Avast Free is no longer compatible with non-SSE2 systems he was told by DavidR:

That isn't what is being said. It appears to be that the offline installer (full 200MB+ installation file) does a/the check for the SSE-2 functionality (which fails) and the online (5-6MB) stub installer doesn't check so it can get installed.

Clearly, there is a difference of opinion here, so I tried to find out from Avast (and elsewhere) what the system requirements are for Avast Free 2016; not an easy job. At least as a guide I looked at the system requirements on an Avast webpage for Avast Premier 2016, which insisted on an SSE2 system (for those who don’t know this was brought in with Intel Pentium 4 in 2001, so most computers now use it or presumably an equivalent). As for Avast Free 2016 the system requirements provided by Avast were pretty much the same, but unfortunately made no mention of CPU requirements.

Despite what DavidR has said, it seems unlikely that the Avast installer would look for functionality that it does not require, namely, SSE2. My old, but very good laptop computer does not support SSE2; it uses a Pentium III mobile CPU, which, from what I have learned, means that I cannot update my Avast anti-virus other than in respect of manually downloading the latest virus definitions, as I did recently.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[bob3160]

This should help:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-vSic0iJgyeUmdXVmxRQVZRZk0&usp=sharing