AVG recently published version 9.0 of their AV software. I’m running the standard (paid) AV 8.x version and got prompted to upgrade for free. Great. I checked around a bit before the update to see if it was worthwhile. Nothing new (that was worthwhile) but something caught my eye: 50% faster scans?!?
My limited scans (I break up the scans to keep from having a daily “whole computer” scan that would take hours) take about an hour and slow my system to a crawl. A part of this is due to the 1TB disks that I installed recently (with a clean Win XP install so it’s not because the OS has been sitting there for years). Maybe because they’re huge compared to the 300GB ones I used to have or maybe it’s something else, but whenever there’s a lot of disk access, everything slows down.
But, I digress. The scans are slow and I’ve been suspecting that AVG itself (maybe via the Resident Scan) was contributing to this slowdown. So, any sort of improvement is welcome. I also took it with a grain of salt because of the “reason” behind the improvement: caching.
Still, I figured, okay, it’s free for me and I’m ASSUMING they’ve tested it and shown it is in fact faster. Ugh. Big mistake. After installing and rebooting (a couple times at that), I left my computer running for a while (few hours). When I got back, it was responding like a son of a bitch. Just opening a folder took upwards of 15-20 seconds when it used to be more like 2-3.
Then I made the mistake of trying to set up a Scheduled Task. While my system didn’t freeze, nothing was using CPU except for the AVG processes avgcsrvx.exe and avgchsvx.exe. The former is supposed to be part of the Resident Scan. Except I don’t get why the Resident Scan needs FOUR to FIVE processes running: two under the System account and three under my account.
The other process is the new caching process…a process you’ll have to get comfortable with since it’ll be running on your system for quite a while. In fact, it was running (and has had the opportunity to run) for those four hours I was away from my computer doing nothing on it and it was STILL running.
Then an Optimization Scan started out of the blue that I couldn’t pause. I let it run and fortunately it only took a few minutes with low disk churn before it finished. But, then it started the scan that I scheduled for Saturday (today is Tuesday). I know it was still scheduled for Saturday because I checked my scheduled scans and had to fix my weekday one (Monday through Friday) since it only had Wednesday checked off.
So much for a smooth upgrade experience.
I rebooted again to clear everything…correction, I had to hard reset my computer because I couldn’t kill any of the Resident Scan processes which were churning at 1-2% of CPU but seemingly keeping the whole system from operating.
Now, the system’s running but things like FireFox and Word are taking longer than they did before. I’m hoping that this stupid cache process will do it’s job and fix everything…and stop running one day. We’ll see…stay tuned.
out
UPDATE: After oh, nearly 8 hours since I installed the update the cache process has finally stopped running continuously. Things are definitely running faster but they are not anywhere near faster than it used to be. Sorry. 50% of zero is still zero I guess.
Meanwhile, I’ve run into other issues which I’ll document in another post. Seems any previously scheduled regular scans get fubared by the upgrade install and once again AVG reveals alerts for items (in this case tracking cookies) that give you no real idea what you can do to get rid of the issue…but there are plenty of options to ignore/skip over the issue…that’s what I pay for when I buy an Internet security software package…options to ignore threats rather than remove them. Bravo AVG. Welcome to my ire.
out again
