So I'm not sure when the update was that affected the gaming performance on my computer but it was between last Friday and this Tuesday (because I played fined last Thursday and slow this Tuesday).
The main thing is that I do a bit of multitasking while gaming with fullscreen windowed (voice, video recording, browsing, video watching, sometimes music), so before the problem started I was able to open most of these programs without any noticeable drop on frame rate on my game. After the problem started opening any program froze (or almost froze) my game for 1 or 2 seconds and 3 to 6 times for each program, using the programs didn't slow the game much but something felt slower.
I have an AMD FX 6300 CPU and my main game is not that greatly optimized (it only uses 2 CPUs at most), so I'm guessing the problem might be CPU related, but changing the affinity of my game to any cores didn't seem to help.
My system runs windows 7 64 bit, my main game uses 32 bit executables(swtor) but I got similar stutter on 64bit executable game (quake champions).
the latest version of avast installed today was 17.4.3482.0, free version with only these features installed: file shield, behaviour shield, web shield, mail shield, game mode (not sure about this last one as I don't remember installing it but since many weeks ago I got an avast popup of new games being added to a list when running them for the first time).
I really didn't expect avast to be the culprit as it has run smoothly for many years, but after cleaning, rebuilding, benchmarking and bios flashing my computer the only thing that fix my problem was to uninstall avast, so here I am, asking for your help.
Any recommendations to be able to have avast and still have a good performance like in the past (beginning of last week)? Thanks
