Avast anti-virus
Hi guys
Well I seem to be the king of finding the most stubborn IT situations that are almost impossible to solve so I thought I'd intriduce my latest:
Avast... It's being a pig. System boots, login, desktop freezes, CTRL+ALTDEL brings up the tasky and all the running processes are ownerless! No use account is responsible for anything running. Crash explorer and restart it and nothing. Restart system, login as Administrator and don't even hit the desktop. I can only just about login via safe mode.
It's been a royal pain in the grass ever since 2 things:
I upgraded AVG7.5 to 8
I tried to change he login screen to a custom one.
At the latter point AVG8 refused to work properly so I uninstalled and tried avast. Avast went belly up so I uninstalled that and risked it for a while with nothing (I'm not much of an explorer online really). Now last night I did something totally stupid (as you do like) and opened a search result. Nout wrong with that I thought as google normally warns of anything harmful. Suddenly popups everywhere telling me I'm infected and taking me to highqualityscans.com for a free animated gif scan telling me I'm riddled with virus's - Jeez I wonder where they came from and what highqualityscans.com website will make a few quid?
Anyway reinstalled avast today - same old problem again. Into safe mode where it instantly starts finding malware (THANKYOU highqualityscans.com).
Luckily avast works in safe mode and does a disk scan on startup before windows boots properly. So at the moment I'm 12% done after over an hour
So... anyone got any ideas as to why Avast refuses to run properly after logging in? It's driving me mad. I'm going to have to safe mode the machine after this scan just to uninstall it again and again be protectionless.
Snag is I've got almost nowhere to back stuff up so its nearly all on my infected c: drive. I've got a knackered 80GB drive which wasn't healthy last time i was running windows off it, and I've got 100GB on my laptop... which is also a bit dodgy after thumping the hell out of it for being so annoying (random shut downs which I traced to the battery and heat - its fine when plugged into the mains though). All the other drives I have are all like 20GB, 10GB etc. i do have one other 30GB but its condition is totally unknown being a 2nd hand unit from the local freecycle!
Shame about people being such t*ssers isn't it. Writing virus's and malware crap just to give someone else a hard miserable day. It's so frustrating. The last serious hit I took was back in the late 90s when I got hit with sub7 trojan (nasty stuff that was on a machine worth over £1k - it wiped the system tatoo and taught the local PC world lads some new skills fixing it). I've stayed free of nasty virus's so long I forgot how annoying they can be.
I'd definately make the switch to linux if it was a bit easier to understand and use. I tried ubuntu - which is supposed to be the best and you can't even login remotely and use it as a headless box! Of course you can switch to the command line, tap in tons of overly complex stuff and install a freeNX program - after you've tapped in all of its configuration data and got tons of annoying responses like "command not understood", spent 3 hours googling a reason, another 4 googling the cure etc etc etc.
Ah well, rant over lol. Sunday afternoon with the normal rain, nothing but massive computer headaches.... What more could I ask for eh?
Happy weekend!
Well I seem to be the king of finding the most stubborn IT situations that are almost impossible to solve so I thought I'd intriduce my latest:
Avast... It's being a pig. System boots, login, desktop freezes, CTRL+ALTDEL brings up the tasky and all the running processes are ownerless! No use account is responsible for anything running. Crash explorer and restart it and nothing. Restart system, login as Administrator and don't even hit the desktop. I can only just about login via safe mode.
It's been a royal pain in the grass ever since 2 things:
I upgraded AVG7.5 to 8
I tried to change he login screen to a custom one.
At the latter point AVG8 refused to work properly so I uninstalled and tried avast. Avast went belly up so I uninstalled that and risked it for a while with nothing (I'm not much of an explorer online really). Now last night I did something totally stupid (as you do like) and opened a search result. Nout wrong with that I thought as google normally warns of anything harmful. Suddenly popups everywhere telling me I'm infected and taking me to highqualityscans.com for a free animated gif scan telling me I'm riddled with virus's - Jeez I wonder where they came from and what highqualityscans.com website will make a few quid?
Anyway reinstalled avast today - same old problem again. Into safe mode where it instantly starts finding malware (THANKYOU highqualityscans.com).
Luckily avast works in safe mode and does a disk scan on startup before windows boots properly. So at the moment I'm 12% done after over an hour
So... anyone got any ideas as to why Avast refuses to run properly after logging in? It's driving me mad. I'm going to have to safe mode the machine after this scan just to uninstall it again and again be protectionless.
Snag is I've got almost nowhere to back stuff up so its nearly all on my infected c: drive. I've got a knackered 80GB drive which wasn't healthy last time i was running windows off it, and I've got 100GB on my laptop... which is also a bit dodgy after thumping the hell out of it for being so annoying (random shut downs which I traced to the battery and heat - its fine when plugged into the mains though). All the other drives I have are all like 20GB, 10GB etc. i do have one other 30GB but its condition is totally unknown being a 2nd hand unit from the local freecycle!
Shame about people being such t*ssers isn't it. Writing virus's and malware crap just to give someone else a hard miserable day. It's so frustrating. The last serious hit I took was back in the late 90s when I got hit with sub7 trojan (nasty stuff that was on a machine worth over £1k - it wiped the system tatoo and taught the local PC world lads some new skills fixing it). I've stayed free of nasty virus's so long I forgot how annoying they can be.
I'd definately make the switch to linux if it was a bit easier to understand and use. I tried ubuntu - which is supposed to be the best and you can't even login remotely and use it as a headless box! Of course you can switch to the command line, tap in tons of overly complex stuff and install a freeNX program - after you've tapped in all of its configuration data and got tons of annoying responses like "command not understood", spent 3 hours googling a reason, another 4 googling the cure etc etc etc.
Ah well, rant over lol. Sunday afternoon with the normal rain, nothing but massive computer headaches.... What more could I ask for eh?
Happy weekend!
I've had no problems with Avast on XP - apart from its irritating habit of talking 
Personally, I would never install two AV programs onto Windows - they are likely to conflict.
Neither would I take the risk of running without any AV at all - you are guaranteed a PC that is riddled with Viruses (Virii?) and other Malware. I did an experiment with an old PC - installed XP, then connected to the Internet with no AV or firewall, and went looking for a Freeware program to edit some Audio files. It took 20 minutes for the PC to become almost un-usable. Using a bootable disk to scan the drive revealed >1000 pieces of assorted Viruses, Trojans, etc, etc.
If presented with a PC showing the symptoms described, I would always advise a reformat and reinstall - as you have already decided to do.
Regards
Richard
Personally, I would never install two AV programs onto Windows - they are likely to conflict.
Neither would I take the risk of running without any AV at all - you are guaranteed a PC that is riddled with Viruses (Virii?) and other Malware. I did an experiment with an old PC - installed XP, then connected to the Internet with no AV or firewall, and went looking for a Freeware program to edit some Audio files. It took 20 minutes for the PC to become almost un-usable. Using a bootable disk to scan the drive revealed >1000 pieces of assorted Viruses, Trojans, etc, etc.
If presented with a PC showing the symptoms described, I would always advise a reformat and reinstall - as you have already decided to do.
Regards
Richard
Cheers for the info guys
I don't normally operate without protection but due to AVG8 and avast both going cranky on this machine I decided to chance it for as long as I could get away with lol.
I got away with it for about 2 weeks which is longer than most folk! I realized what had happened when I hit one site and the pop ups came up everywhere and there was a lot of HDD rumbling. Then of course the windows for highqualityscans.com which kept coming to me time and time again. Basically, we'll hijack your pc and then tell you that you need to buy our legitimately useless software to get rid of it. Annoying but I'd rather reformat than ever give in to people like that.
I backed up every thing on to another drive on another machine via ethernet. Unfortunately the laptop hard drive expired today (which is where I had an older backup) which has left me in a pickle. I made a 2nd backup on an old 80GB drive which I know is on limited time (as all mine seem to be). Snag is I know I really need a 3rd backup (my luck is always bad lol) yet I've not got enough drives/space to do it. I thought about winrar'ing all 25GB and then splitting it over several DVDs then realised I'm temporarily out of stock!
Here's hoping I don't loose both backups!
I don't normally operate without protection but due to AVG8 and avast both going cranky on this machine I decided to chance it for as long as I could get away with lol.
I got away with it for about 2 weeks which is longer than most folk! I realized what had happened when I hit one site and the pop ups came up everywhere and there was a lot of HDD rumbling. Then of course the windows for highqualityscans.com which kept coming to me time and time again. Basically, we'll hijack your pc and then tell you that you need to buy our legitimately useless software to get rid of it. Annoying but I'd rather reformat than ever give in to people like that.
I backed up every thing on to another drive on another machine via ethernet. Unfortunately the laptop hard drive expired today (which is where I had an older backup) which has left me in a pickle. I made a 2nd backup on an old 80GB drive which I know is on limited time (as all mine seem to be). Snag is I know I really need a 3rd backup (my luck is always bad lol) yet I've not got enough drives/space to do it. I thought about winrar'ing all 25GB and then splitting it over several DVDs then realised I'm temporarily out of stock!
Here's hoping I don't loose both backups!
Well guys I'm glad to say I'm back with a nice fresh system
I've installed Avast bravely and actually on a fresh system it works nicely. No freezing or any problems I had previously. I'm actually rather pleased with it. Don't get me wrong I liked AVG but it was a bit of a pain sometimes and it wasn't the most informative of programs either. Also the GUI sucked although v8 did start to resemble something better than previous versions.
Anyway guys thanks for listening
I've installed Avast bravely and actually on a fresh system it works nicely. No freezing or any problems I had previously. I'm actually rather pleased with it. Don't get me wrong I liked AVG but it was a bit of a pain sometimes and it wasn't the most informative of programs either. Also the GUI sucked although v8 did start to resemble something better than previous versions.
Anyway guys thanks for listening
Pleased that everything has gone well. IMO there's nothing nicer in computing than a fresh start. Glad that you are getting on OK with Avast - should keep you from getting infected again.
Hi okrzynska
Glad all went well
I do get on with AVG 8.0 myself. If you uninstalled Avg because of the recent Update Manager problems, redtube gave this advice that worked:
‘delete your "sched.cfg" in wherever you have the \avg8\cfg\ directory (run a search to find sched.cfg usually in c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\avg8\Cfg) then tick automatic updates in the AVG config utility and update then reboot your comp. The file "sched.cfg" re creates itself again and it fixed the Update Manager error for me. Automatic daily updates continue as normal now.’
If I’ve done this correctly, here is a link to the thread
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,67563.16.html
Glad all went well
I do get on with AVG 8.0 myself. If you uninstalled Avg because of the recent Update Manager problems, redtube gave this advice that worked:
‘delete your "sched.cfg" in wherever you have the \avg8\cfg\ directory (run a search to find sched.cfg usually in c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\avg8\Cfg) then tick automatic updates in the AVG config utility and update then reboot your comp. The file "sched.cfg" re creates itself again and it fixed the Update Manager error for me. Automatic daily updates continue as normal now.’
If I’ve done this correctly, here is a link to the thread
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,67563.16.html