Stealing intellectual property seems to be the way companies get ahead these days. Seems to be working for the Chinese stealing American IPs. But other than the morality of the company, why should I remove Iobit products? Seems more like a push to abandon Iobit and go for Malwarebytes, which is a very expensive program.
Anyway, I no longer need help. I removed Avast Antivirus and installed Total AV instead. Total AV has been running smoothly, found three threats that Avast didn't when I installed Total AV and ran it, and Total AV isn't eating up massive amounts of system resources. I liked it so much that I even bought a year's subscription for it. I don't think I'm ever going back to Avast Antivirus.
Why? Well because the event that led to removing it wasn't the only time I had issues with Avast. Maybe the developers here should look into the issues:
1. I tried running Northgard.exe (a Steam game) and it labelled it a virus and quarantined it. Every time I redownloaded the game, it quarantined it. Thus I haven't been able to play Northgard for the past 9 months.
2. Actually any game on Steam caused issue with the Antivirus. There may be something with how Steam operates that Avast doesn't like, for whatever reasons.
3. Several times I tried to upload files to Mediafire, and Avast blocked me from uploading the files. They were simply 3 jpgs in a folder in a zip, but it would not let me upload them. I had to disable all of Avast's shields and defenses for 10 minutes in order to do the uploads. I've had it also block uploads of text files, and even a compiled (technically frozen) python game that I made.
4. If I refused to let Avast update my machine when it requested Avast would bork most functionality in Internet Explorer. I couldn't right click anymore, copy/paste was denied, and couldn't download files through IE. Could still do all of this in Google Chrome however. So why keep IE on the computer? Simple = IE allows me to play shockwave flash files, whereas Google Chrome immediately blocks them.
5. Avast's Safezone was continually forced upon me, until I fully uninstalled it. Every time I would take it off my startup program list, it would re-add itself to the list after about 10-15 minutes after removing it. Then every time I'd restart my computer, safe zone was forcefully loaded and opened and would disable my Google Chrome as the primary web browser.
6. Avast's web searching protection conflicted with Ad Block Plus, resulting in both IE and Chrome performing super slowly, until I removed Avast's protections.
7. Avast would prevent the use of safe programs, such as compiled Unreal Engine 4 games, and sometimes quarantine the files, making the game unplayable.
So yah, not an isolated incident and I've been having progressively harder times with Avast over the past 12 months. I had been using Avast for the past 10 years, but it is clear to me it is time to switch to a new Antivirus. I paid for premium for about 5 out of 10 of those years (I used it on my old rig and paid premium but not this current rig), and you guys have lost a customer for life. I suggest looking into the above issues so that you don't lose more customers.
