Avast 7 Scheduled Full System Scans - Don't seem to stick to schedule

[Abdul69]

Hi there,

Long time Avast user (since v4), but I have noticed some problems with the Scheduler in v7 (which I am sure only used to be a feature for paying users, but now it seems also to be in the free version). The short story is that the scheduled scans do not seem to run when they are scheduled, but at some random time. For example, my system is set to scan at 4am, but it just started to scan at 8:30pm. My wife's system earlier today started to scan at 8am when her machine is set to scan at 11pm.

All these machines are most definitely on at the scheduled scan times, not in sleep mode (even though wake from sleep is set in Avast as a precaution).

I'm losing confidence in programmer's abilities to write code that runs automated unattended tasks since I have experience problems lately with several programs (incl one of M$'s own), each time just reverting to writing my own scripts and scheduling them with Task Scheduler so I know they really will run. So failing some known issue with Avast 7's scanning (Avast 6 and earlier seemed to work no problem) does anyone know if a command line scan can be scheduled? (I'd be willing to go back to the paid version if it works and is only available there).

Thanks.

ps/ Sorry if this is a question asked often; I did some searching and found nothing completely relevant/recent.

[CraigB]

The avast scheduler works fine here and always has done on my own two personal systems and the twenty odd other systems iv installed avast on so i would say there must be something your not setting right or maybe something on your system is blocking avast from starting its scans, also check that your system time is set correctly.

[Abdul69]

My system time is definitely OK on all systems (set to sync with time server).

Which OS are you using that you say it works OK on? I am using Win7 x64 in all cases. As I say it seemed to work OK in Avast 6 (paid version), but I am now running into issues with 7 (free version).

I have a different scan scheduled for about 5 hours' time so I'll see if that one goes to schedule. I have also set up scan reports so I can see what is happening at the scheduled time (if anything), but today's two odd scans both kicked off at wrong times with someone sitting in front of the computer, so it was pretty obvious that the time was not right.

Cheers.

[Abdul69]

I'm not a PC spec sig kind of guy, but I can see on a forum like this it can be useful... I'll assume from your sig also Win7 x64. 

[CraigB]

Which OS are you using that you say it works OK on? I am using Win7 x64 in all cases.

My systems are in my signiture and all the other systems range from XP, Vista through to win7 32 and 64 bit and not one problem on any of them.

[Abdul69]

I just checked the scan log (nice feature) on 5 different systems and they are all pretty hit and miss. Some scans do in fact go off at the scheduled time, but mostly not. That would make me think that perhaps Avast is waiting for the system to become idle, however, flying in the face of that theory is that one scan started when my wife was using her computer and another later today when I was using mine. Neither of those situations were what I would call idle (unless Avast interprets someone using a computer as idle and someone not using a computer as not idle).

I think it would be nice for Avast to have a setting that either a) forced it to scan at the scheduled time, or if that was not possible (e.g., machine off), then a setting that stopped Avast trying to run a missed scan and also a reason for any missed scan to help debug that case. I really only want it to run at the scheduled time, or not at all. Running when I'm in the middle of other tasks is just a pain (although easy to stop if you catch the notification pop up; my wife probably didn't pay much attention to it).

I'll keep monitoring this over the next couple of weeks, but overall the scheduled scans seem a little flaky in v7. The only common software on all of the above 5 systems is Windows itself so I cannot think of any possible conflicts. Two of the machines are as close to a clean Windows install as most users would get.