Having used PCs since the early days of the Intel 8088-based personal computer, I’m always baffled by the amount of instability in today’s computer systems.
I build my own computer systems and one would expect that the notorious “blue screen of death” (BSOD) would be a remnant of the past, since software and hardware have advanced.
An onslaught of crashes on a new and fairly clean system led me to believe that hardware was the issue.Too many failures during simple tasks like browsing or checking email led to almost catastrophic data loss at some point. I was able to recover data due to my backup process.
As a last resort, I decided to uninstall the Avast! antivirus that seemed to stall at the same time the crashes occurred. Surprisingly, the BSOD screens went away.
I’m now running AVG antivirus which seems to respect the system resources; it even lets me know when the browser is using an increased amount of memory. No crashes whatsoever during the week that I’ve been testing it.
Googling “Avast BSOD” returns several such reports from others that apparently faced the same issue. In the end, it all comes down to a piece of software that is supposed to protect you from catastrophic data loss.
After this painful experience, I would not recommend Avast antivirus as the choice of antivirus software.
Good advice. Comodo Antivirus is another one that works well for me.
I have been using AVG for about 3 years now – Great Anti Virus – Doesnt slow your system and detects everything so far – Like the nasty trojan horse last week that got into my laptop.