Anybody still using Avast? Any blue screen popping up?

Avast is not a virus it is an antivirus,but it is not a very good antivirus!

* Microsoft Security Essentials
http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/mse.aspx

Use this^

* Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free
http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

and this^

Welcome to the Forum !  

I've been using Avast for the last 3 years. Other than a few glitches in earlier releases (none of them blue screen), it has been just fine. Avast 5.0 and higher are excellent.

Who says Avast is not a good AV? I'd use it before I would use Microsoft's Security Essentials. They tried to sell an antivirus called Live OneCare a few years back, couldn't, and started giving away Security Essentials. Guess I just don't have confidence in their product if they couldn't sell enough copies to consider it a moneymaker, and started giving it away. I used to be a big AVG fan, but started using Avast and not looking back. I also find that Avast many times has found things left behind by other programs.

As far as everything, if you want AVG back on, hit f8 before the windows loading bar, it should give you a menu, boot into safe mode. In safe mode, try to uinstall Avast, then reboot and immediately download and reinstall AVG.

I will say the last machines I saw that had AVG, were badly infected. One had a pretty bad rootkit. Needless to say both of them had to be wiped and have windows reinstalled to get them working fine, as AVG had let malware directly around it, and they were pretty deeply embedded. Since I've been using Avast, I've not had a major infection on my system.

Hi.

I have been using the free Avast over the past three years on two W7/64 bit machines and two Windows XP SP3 machines with the Windows firewall in all cases and I have had not trouble with this application until the other week.

After I upgraded the RAM from 12 GB to 24 GB on one of my W7/64 machines I kept getting BlueScreen (BSs) of the type IRQL NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS_THAN_ZERO with code 0x0000...A with a stop at a consistent RAM address. I did exhaustive tests to make sure that the newly installed memory wasn't the cause of the problem. It was also obvious from the consistency of the 'stop address' shown as the 5th parameter of the BS that it was most likely some driver that caused the problem. When I closely searched as to which driver may be the problem, I discovered that I could consistently produce the BS when making a diagnostic check on the HomeGroup. While I did this Avast started to behave in an erratic way - that is: not only did it disable itself but it also used a pop up message to indicate that Avast is out of date and not registered. I knew that this was not true as Avast was up to date and registered.

I know then that Avast was interacting in some way with the HomeGroup part of the system and possibly the network adaptor the driver of which I knew was up to date and OK.

I solve the BS problem by uninstalling Avast (it was fortunately a clean uninstall). With no antivirus application I then re-ran the diagnostic test on the HomeGroup part of the system with no BS resulting. I knew then that Avast was causing the BSs.

I then re-installed Avast again, ran all the necessary tests and BS occurred again.

The lesson to be learnt from all this is that whenever you make a HW change or some other major change to your system that may cause driver settings to change, the ani-virus application may conflict with the new setup and cause BSs.

Ernst

I say Avast, Avira, AVG, Microsoft Security Essentials are all good free anti-virus. Which one is best for you depends on your usage and preference on GUI.

They are all free, so why not try them all (but don't install them all at the same time. I am sure they will conflict) and see which one suits you the best?