I've been using BitDefender Total Security 2013 for the last year now and have generally been fairly happy with it. My subscription expired a few days ago and I couldn't really justify the cost of renewing it because I simply didn't make use of all the extra features in the paid version. I'm a fairly savvy Internet user and know to keep away from the darker corners of the interweb, and as such really just want a basic antivirus product.

 

So with that in mind I started looking into the free antivirus products available to replace my BitDefender Total Security. It seems that a lot of tech websites and publications were singing the praises of Avast. I totally removed BitDefender from my system, downloaded and installed Avast and let it do it's thing. All seemed well until I loaded up FSX. My framerates had taken a huge nosedive. I was struggling to maintain 10-15fps in places where I had previously been locked at 30fps. I initially didn't make the link with the new antivirus and spent an evening rebuilding my FSX.cfg, turning all the sliders to the left... all to no avail. The framerate was stuck stubbornly at 10-15fps.

 

Finally I remembered I had installed Avast. I disabled Avast (all the "shield" features) from the system tray icon, but the framerate was still down in the doldrums. I then uninstalled Avast and found my framerate had gone back to its normal healthy value. Just to be sure I reinstalled Avast, and sure enough it went back down to 10-15fps again. I then made exclusions for my FSX folder in Avast but still the poor framerates persisted.

 

Finally I uninstalled Avast and installed AVG Free which has had absolutely no effect on my FSX framerate.

 

 

So.....

 

Has anyone else experienced this with Avast? I'm really curious because all the reviews and feedback I read praised it for it's very light system performance impact but it would appear that it doesn't get along at all with FSX.

I've used Avast for almost a decade and have not experienced any FPS drops. Though my experience with other anti-virus software is limited, so I dont really have much to compare with. But I've had systems with McAfee and others enabled on trial when I bought the system, before the trial ended and I went back to avast.

 

I'd be very interested if it turns out avast features are limiting my FPS.

I switched to Avast from AVG some time ago but only on my laptop which runs FS related software. I don't have any AV on my FS PC as I rarely go online with it.

 

If you go into Settings - Global Exclusions there is the facility to exclude a program from being monitored. Maybe that would help with performance.

 

PC Pro (UK) gave a thumbs up to Avast rating it slightly higher than AVG which I felt was becoming too intrusive.

I've used Microsoft Security Essentials for the last year and a half.  It's free, seems very lightweight and does the job very well. 

Ive been using avast for years and never had any issues with it, will never use avg free as i have had to help to many people who have have viruses etc.. from thier pc while running that av software.

I use Avast for 5-6 Years now, i choosed avast becouse is very "light" on system resources. Just ensure that you have FSX excluded from antivirus scanning, this should be done with all AV programs

Another satisfied Avast! user here.  I switched from AVG many years ago and have not looked back.  MS Security Essentials also has a very good reputation.  The one thing I have done with Avast! is to turn off automatic updates and scheduled drive scanning.  I manually update the engine and definitions daily, but I did not want the program to start updating or scanning drives in the middle of a flight.

This is really curious guys. I did exclude my FSX folder in Avast using the "global exclusion" function.

 

Can any of you with it working properly explain exactly how you want about making the exclusion and what exactly you excluded?

I have under global exclusion FSX main folder, folder with all CFG files - in Windows 7 "C:\Users\"YourUsername"\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX", and "C:\Users\"YourUsername"\Documents\Flight Simulator X Files".

 

It may be something else in your case, maybe some conflict between AVAST and some other application / process on your PC

I switched from AVG to Avira. But Avira do not now support 32bit so I went back AVG. No problems at all.

Been using it for a while here as well. Works fine. But dont just stop the FSX folder from being scanned, go to your Behaviour Shield settings and exclude the FSX exe file from being monitored as well.

Yes, I have been using Avast for over 8 years. I use it on all of my systems at home and I believe it works well. To tell you the truth I do NOT disable it when running FSX and I don't believe it has a significant impact on FSX performance. I do not let automatic updates install without me reviewing first, downloads also only happen when I say yes.