AVG and system grinding to a halt
Over the past few months all 3 of our XP systems have been grinding to a halt when running either IE or Firefox. My laptop got so bad that it could not download the whole of some webpages before the sending server lost the will to live. After looking through threads on here and elsewhere I decided to re-install an earlier version of AVG. I failed to find one on the internet but a quick trawl through our systems revealed that we have a download of AVG 8.0.4xx on one system. I collected it on a memory stick and then went round un-installing AVG 9.x and attempting to install 8.0.4xx. The first system, my 1.4 Gig laptop, went well and, lo and behold, it flies now. On my partners laptop, a tad older than mine, the un-install went fine but the install failed, several times, with differing numbers of warnings and errors each time. Ho hum. In the end I downloaded and installed AVG 9.x and, unbelievably, it also runs faster than it has done for a long time.
I don't understand. Is a clean install of AVG 9 better than an upgrade? Have they fixed AVG 9. I am a bit hesitant to do the final machine but I fear that I will need to if it gets any slower.
Incidentally, task manager and process explorer both showed some headroom of both cpu and commit charge but the machine was achieving nothing. AVG does not register highly in the task manager process list.
If the cpu is mostly doing system idle and memory is running at 60 to 70%, how should I investigate the cause of the bottleneck.
Any help will be gratefully received.
Rans6Andrew.