avast 4.7 home greatly slowing down pc

[XandirPW]

i installed this avast! 4.7 home edition earlier today since the last anti virus program i used was disappointing.
anyway, i've noticed that since avast has been installed my pc seems to be operating rather slow & regardless of whatever i do(playing a game, listening to music, browsing the web, etc) every few seconds or so my pc will freeze momentarily.
i see that everytime that happens "AshServ.exe" will cause the CPU usage to jump upto 99% & noticed that the priority level on it is set to 'High' and if i try and change/lower the priority it just says 'access denied'.

does anyone know how to stop avast from screwing with the pc like this?

thanks!

[.: Mac :.]

What Version of Windows are you running?

[DavidR]

i installed this avast! 4.7 home edition earlier today since the last anti virus program i used was disappointing.

What was it and How did you get rid of it ?

anyway, i've noticed that since avast has been installed my pc seems to be operating rather slow & regardless of whatever i do(playing a game, listening to music, browsing the web, etc) every few seconds or so my pc will freeze momentarily.
i see that everytime that happens "AshServ.exe" will cause the CPU usage to jump upto 99% & noticed that the priority level on it is set to 'High' and if i try and change/lower the priority it just says 'access denied'.

The idea of ashServ.exe having high priority is so it can scan with little interference and be able to hand back quickly.

It would be interesting to find out what it is scanning (the avast icon should be rotating). Enable the 'Show detailed info on performed actions' in the Standard Shield, see below and the Web Shield providers, this will show a list of what is being scanned. it might be a log file or something else that you can then add to the exclusions (standard shield and Program Settings, Exclusions) if you feel it is safe.

[Lisandro]

I see that everytime that happens "AshServ.exe" will cause the CPU usage to jump upto 99% & noticed that the priority level on it is set to 'High' and if i try and change/lower the priority it just says 'access denied'.

Changing the priority does not help in anyway.
avast! is running in High priority so it finishes the given task faster and releases CPU power to other things. Changing to Normal would only make the things worse.
I think you did not remove your previous antivirus well... Which was it?

[Orista]

yeah well i have the same problem with ashserv.exe slowing down my computer by taking all my cpu power and i just reinstalled windows so no previous antivirus installation it just freezes momentarily almost every time i do anything even just right clicking on a file and i find this very strange it runs fine on my laptop but on my desktop it really takes it down

[New_Age]

I'm having a similar problem. Avast! is scanning my SpywareTerminator.exe and SpywareTerminatorShield.exe file. What is causing the hang on my CPU?

[alanrf]

New_Age

I am not sure that you problem is the same as the others in this thread and may be better in a thread of its own since nobody else in this thread has mentioned using Spyware Terminator.

I have just tried to reproduce the problem you are reporting with Spyware Terminator.  I have just installed the product on my system (WinXP SP2 fully up to date).  I have tried to turn on just about every feature it allows.  The one thing I did not do was accept the offer during installation to install Clam AV.  Did you avoid that or accept it? 

I am running avast Standard Shield, Webshield, Network Shield and Internet Mail provider.  For the first three of those I have moved the sensitivity to "High".  I have just run a full scan by Spyware Terminator.  During the scan I could never detect ashServ.exe running at more than 2% CPU utilization while Spyware Terminator's scan process was running at 25-26%.

During normal operation of my system with both avast and Spyware Terminator running with both their resident scanners I am unable to detect any performance degradation. 

Perhaps you can give us a little more information about your system configuration ... and may I suggest ... in a new thread.       

[Lisandro]

Alanrf, which is your experience with Spyware Terminator?
Did you disable Windows Defender and keep just ST?

[alanrf]

Tech

I had Windows Defender running resident at the same time as Spyware Terminator.

[Lisandro]

I had Windows Defender running resident at the same time as Spyware Terminator.

Do you think it worth? I mean, WD seems to be just there doing nothing and eating resources...
Maybe my computer is not as powerful as yours. I don't want a second resident with avast eating my resources... 

[alanrf]

Tech,

I have no interest in using Spyware Terminator at all.  I use Windows Defender.

I installed ST on my system just to try to reproduce the problem reported by New_Age.

However, your question did make me think how silly it was to be running both together during my test of ST trying to reproduce the problem.  On reflection though, I do not think that it invalidated the results of my testing.

Running avast (with every provider moved to the high setting) and turning on every feature I could find in ST (one of which required a full ST scan to be run first) and with Windows Defender running as resident I noticed no degradation of performance on my system.  The CPU utilization figures are above. 

This testing was conducted on a fairly new system that has dual core 3GHz processors.  While that is more powerful than some - if the problem was an obvious incompatibility between  avast and ST then I should be able to see it too. 

I do not see it and, while we have a few other folks complaining of high CPU utilization by ashServ.exe, there is not another user yet who has reported this issue with Spyware Terminator. 

As to my use of Spyware Terminator ... I am happy to try things like this (and others I have reported on in the past) because, at the end of my testing of this product, with a system restart and about 2 minutes of my time my system was restored to the point a few seconds before I installed Spyware Terminator.         

[tommyhj]

I have  the exact same problem...

Mine was solved (for 10 minutes now at least), by terminating the P2P shield. Everytime it tried to scan files from uTorrent (rather big ones, who continualy change), it would freeze my computerfor 3-5 seconds. this would happen every 20-30.

Now... Isn't it possible to code something that doesn't slow down the entire PC down as much?? Well, at least it's an incentive to buy the pro version, where I can manually change the task priority to normal (as far as I understand), hoping that would help at all. But if the other scanning modules continue to slow down my PC as much, it's a dealbraker - and I'll be forced to uninstall. And yes, I did uninstall previous antivirus program.

I run with SATA150 drives, Athlon XP2400 CPU, 1gb ram - so my system shouldn't be too slow to run an antivirus program...

[Lisandro]

Edited...

Well, at least it's an incentive to buy the pro version, where I can manually change the task priority to normal (as far as I understand)

You've understand badly... this is NOT a feature of Pro version.
Alwil team does NOT do a bad application for free trying to sell the Pro one. It's a serious company.

And yes, I did uninstall previous antivirus program.

Which one?

[Lisandro]

Tech, I am a little confused by your comments.

Sorry... my mistake. I'm messed uTorrent with Azureus...