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I tried to think of an all encompassing title for this so that it might help someone avoid the pain I've just gone through!
Here's the thing, I use my 'pooter a lot, it's a few years old but I look after it. It's running Windows 7 (64 bit) - I have anti virus, firewall and anti malware software installed.
All has been going fine until last weekend when it refused to boot properly. I'd get a desktop showing, maybe a few icons and the spinning circle to show that it was working. Then it'd stop dead.
Nothing would work so I had to hit the reset button. This happened a few times and so I tried booting into safe mode, this worked but when I tried to go for a full reboot it froze and the hard disc light just flickered occasionally. Basically it was showing the symptoms of a hard disc failure and I thought the boot sector may have been corrupted or damaged by all the resets I had to perform so I tried to repair the installation with the original discs. It failed.
I then tried a full reinstall, a very lengthy and painful operation considering all the software I had installed. Luckily, I keep backups of important data on external drives so I knew I wouldn't lose anything important.
After a failed attempt where I got the helpful message "Failed to write image" I tried again. This time it seemed to work and I waited for it to complete. It seemed to hang at around 75% complete for a very long time. (Longer than normal - I've done a few re-installs for other people!)
So I prepared myself for a journey to the local computer store to buy a replacement drive. Just before setting off, I checked again and it had completed successfully.
I ran a program to check the disc as I was now convinced that it was damaged. Being a large (1TB) drive, it took around 3 hours to examine. The good, but confusing, news was that there were no bad sectors on the disc.
So I set about downloading all the Windows updates, machine specific drivers and the essential anti virus. This is where it got interesting and very, very annoying.
I use, or now used to use, Avast anti virus. I went to their website to check for and download the latest version. While there I decided to look at their user forum to see what the latest version was.
At the top of said forum was a topic about their latest release, just what I was looking for so I read on...
And found out that numerous people had a problem with the latest update. It had been causing their machine to hang and become completely unresponsive while booting up! The symptoms matched exactly what I had been experiencing. I was relieved and infuriated at the same time.
Looking back, I can see how it fits, the AV is called for fairly early in the boot up process and any unexpected response from it could cause problems, but I didn't make the connection at the time.
So, sorry to take up so much of your valuable time with my tale of woe but the message is; if you, or someone you know has problems with their computer, check to see if they are using Avast anti virus before you do anything else. The latest I've heard is that it may be a conflict with Malware Bytes or it may be more likely to happen on 64 bit machines but whatever it is, it's a bleedin' nuisance!
My PC will take another day or two to return to it's previous state as I have a lot of software to install. I could have done without all of this so I hope I can save someone else some time!
I now use Bitdefender.
EDITED TO UPDATE - Bitdefender was using a lot of resources so I've now moved on to Webroot
Here's the thing, I use my 'pooter a lot, it's a few years old but I look after it. It's running Windows 7 (64 bit) - I have anti virus, firewall and anti malware software installed.
All has been going fine until last weekend when it refused to boot properly. I'd get a desktop showing, maybe a few icons and the spinning circle to show that it was working. Then it'd stop dead.
Nothing would work so I had to hit the reset button. This happened a few times and so I tried booting into safe mode, this worked but when I tried to go for a full reboot it froze and the hard disc light just flickered occasionally. Basically it was showing the symptoms of a hard disc failure and I thought the boot sector may have been corrupted or damaged by all the resets I had to perform so I tried to repair the installation with the original discs. It failed.
I then tried a full reinstall, a very lengthy and painful operation considering all the software I had installed. Luckily, I keep backups of important data on external drives so I knew I wouldn't lose anything important.
After a failed attempt where I got the helpful message "Failed to write image" I tried again. This time it seemed to work and I waited for it to complete. It seemed to hang at around 75% complete for a very long time. (Longer than normal - I've done a few re-installs for other people!)
So I prepared myself for a journey to the local computer store to buy a replacement drive. Just before setting off, I checked again and it had completed successfully.
I ran a program to check the disc as I was now convinced that it was damaged. Being a large (1TB) drive, it took around 3 hours to examine. The good, but confusing, news was that there were no bad sectors on the disc.
So I set about downloading all the Windows updates, machine specific drivers and the essential anti virus. This is where it got interesting and very, very annoying.
I use, or now used to use, Avast anti virus. I went to their website to check for and download the latest version. While there I decided to look at their user forum to see what the latest version was.
At the top of said forum was a topic about their latest release, just what I was looking for so I read on...
And found out that numerous people had a problem with the latest update. It had been causing their machine to hang and become completely unresponsive while booting up! The symptoms matched exactly what I had been experiencing. I was relieved and infuriated at the same time.
Looking back, I can see how it fits, the AV is called for fairly early in the boot up process and any unexpected response from it could cause problems, but I didn't make the connection at the time.
So, sorry to take up so much of your valuable time with my tale of woe but the message is; if you, or someone you know has problems with their computer, check to see if they are using Avast anti virus before you do anything else. The latest I've heard is that it may be a conflict with Malware Bytes or it may be more likely to happen on 64 bit machines but whatever it is, it's a bleedin' nuisance!
My PC will take another day or two to return to it's previous state as I have a lot of software to install. I could have done without all of this so I hope I can save someone else some time!
I now use Bitdefender.
EDITED TO UPDATE - Bitdefender was using a lot of resources so I've now moved on to Webroot
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