Hello Terry,
We regret the inconvenience this has caused you.
First of all, please make sure that there is no other antivirus software installed on your PC. It is generally not recommended to use more than one security solution on a single system. They will compete for resources, which may result in slowdowns, crashes or in no protection at all.
If you do not have a conflicting antivirus software, please monitor if AVG is running a virus scan on your PC which consumes more resources than usual. We'd also like to inform you that our shields will continuously run in the background, keep scanning some thousands of files every minute as you use the computer.
To detect a file as malware, AVG uses heuristics analysis. Heuristic analysis is a method employed by antivirus programs designed to detect previously unknown computer viruses, as well as new variants of viruses known. In this method, AVG decompile the suspicious program, then analyze the machine code contained within. The source code of the suspicious file is compared to the source code of known viruses and virus-like activities. If a certain percentage of the source code matches with the code of known viruses or virus-like activities, the file is flagged, and the user alerted.
AVG does this for all the files running in the background which could consume more resources. You might experience it is using high resources than it should. Please monitor if AVG is constantly consuming more CPU and if it is, please share a couple of screenshots of your resource monitor with a 10 minute gap between them. We will analyze them and assist you further.
We'd also request you to let us know what is the size of RAM installed in your PC.
My computer was constantly showing >40% CPU utilization in Task Manager for the "AVG Service". I uninstalled AVG Internet Security and ran the AVG Clean tool. Then I reinstalled AVG Internet Security.
After the install, the AVG Service is now using less than 1% CPU (which is good) but now the "AVG Firewall Service" is constantly showing >5% CPU utilization with no other activity in the system.
Is it normal for the Firewall Service to consume this much CPU time, or is there something wrong with the Firewall settings?
We appreciate your efforts in reinstalling AVG, Terry.
We missed to address the query regarding Firewall service's CPU consumption. It seems to be usual. However, please monitor the status & let us know the outcome.
While writing back, include the operating system on your computer & follow these steps to share screenshots here : click on Answer in your topic - select mountain symbol (image icon) - browse & upload image.
The computer is a Dell Inspiron 3793 laptop with an i7-1065G7 CPU and 16GB of RAM. It is a very fast computer when AVG is not bogging it down. There is no conflicting antivirus software installed other than Windows Defender which is disabled.
The problem with the AVG Service using >40% CPU was intermittent and may or may not have been resolved by reinstalling AVG Internet Security. A Windows Restart will fix the problem when it did appear. It was easy to tell because the CPU would be 100% busy with the "AVG Service" process. Time will tell if that is fixed.
The problem you did not address in your response is with the "AVG Firewall" constantly using >5% of the CPU in a system with no other apps running. Is that normal?
I'd like to send you some screen shots of the Task Manager but I do not see how to include a JPG file in my response.
Hello Terry,
We regret the inconvenience this has caused you.
First of all, please make sure that there is no other antivirus software installed on your PC. It is generally not recommended to use more than one security solution on a single system. They will compete for resources, which may result in slowdowns, crashes or in no protection at all.
If you do not have a conflicting antivirus software, please monitor if AVG is running a virus scan on your PC which consumes more resources than usual. We'd also like to inform you that our shields will continuously run in the background, keep scanning some thousands of files every minute as you use the computer.
To detect a file as malware, AVG uses heuristics analysis. Heuristic analysis is a method employed by antivirus programs designed to detect previously unknown computer viruses, as well as new variants of viruses known. In this method, AVG decompile the suspicious program, then analyze the machine code contained within. The source code of the suspicious file is compared to the source code of known viruses and virus-like activities. If a certain percentage of the source code matches with the code of known viruses or virus-like activities, the file is flagged, and the user alerted.
AVG does this for all the files running in the background which could consume more resources. You might experience it is using high resources than it should. Please monitor if AVG is constantly consuming more CPU and if it is, please share a couple of screenshots of your resource monitor with a 10 minute gap between them. We will analyze them and assist you further.
We'd also request you to let us know what is the size of RAM installed in your PC.