Avast not working

[day150]

I downloaded the avast free trial last weekend and activated it after uninstalling Norton. CNET had given it a good review. The result has been a mess, it's like going back to dial-up aol. If somebody can't get me some info on how to make this work better, it gets uninstalled this weekend. Both IE and Chrome have staggered to an almost complete halt. Avast kills ten or fifteen minutes every time I try to go online updating itself, even if it just updated a few hours ago. Any ideas?

[CraigB]

You may have uninstalled Norton but did you remove the remnants? after running the removal tool for Norton from here http://singularlabs.com/uninstallers/security-software/ you need to reboot, follow with a repair of avast and reboot again - if issue is still not fixed norton may have corrupted avast beyond repair and a clean install of avast will be required.

[day150]

Thanks, I'll see if it helps.

I saw on another topic that avast updates every two hours. Isn't that kind of excessive? I would think once every 24 hours at 3am would be fine. I can't do anything while it's updating.

[DavidR]

I don't know what the context of that is but your assumption is incorrect. By default avast 'checks' for updates every 240 minutes, there may or may not be an update available. Generally there are two auto-updates a day; there are also streaming updates (avast 7, cloud services), these are for more important updates that shouldn't wait until the next regular update release.

The free version of avast can lower this update 'check' down to 120 minutes, but that doesn't mean it is going to update every two hours.

The paid versions of avast can reduce the checking interval even further down to 30 (or possibly 15) minutes.

[day150]

Well maybe it just checks, but I can't do anything until it finishes checking. Maybe trying to kill off the Norton remnants will help. It's really frustrating.