Last night I noticed quite abruptly that many of my apps had stopped working and the computer in general was acting very slow. I restarted the computer, but after the inital Toshiba opening screen the computer went blank with a little spinning circle. After maybe a minute or two AVG Watchdog tries to initialize, fails, and appears to freeze the computer. Several times now I have attempted to boot into safe mode by pressing F8 and shift/F8 repeatedly as soon as I turn on the computer, but so far I keep getting the same result I outlined above.
I just made an account here to ask for help, and will admit that I know the basics but am not very skilled with this type of thing. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated.
AVG and Windows 10 Anniversary Update don't get on well together, apparently. See this (lengthy) thread which includes this solution from Ubyte...uByte replied on October 7, 2016
After much research I think I have found the answer to everyone's problem and how to fix it. This issue is something with the new Windows 10 Anniversary Update and AVG (I have had the same problem with AVG Cloudcare and AVG Free). The best way to go is remove AVG and use something else.
Booting to Safe Mode
You will have to get your computer to boot to the preboot menu for Windows 10. To do this I had to physically turn the computer off 3 times when it showed the windows 10 logo. The third time it should say something like "Preparing to Run Automatic Repair"...
Win 10 AU doesn't like much of anything it seems....
Back in the day, when AVG was still new, I used it exclusively and shared it with all my hundreds of customers.
Well, that was then and this is now and AVG (free) has definitely become something else. I no longer use it and no longer install it for any of my customers.
I prefer to use use Windows Defender and then supplement that with 'Super Anti-Spyware', 'Spyware Blaster', Malware Bytes Anti-Exploit, and 'Anti-Logger Free' from Zemana. Using these programs, I and my customers remain Virus and Spyware free.
So there is definitely a good alternative to AVG.
Cheers and Happy Computing,
TechnoMage
Thanks for the help everyone! Followed that thread and a few others and got it fixed. Uninstalled AVG and for now have Defender running while I look at other options.
Sorry, but I had to do this to read the OP's screen cap post, so I thought I'd share:
BTW, there's a thread on the AVG support blog that addresses this issue. Startup message about Watchdog Initialization? | AVG It's covered in the post from Kishore/AVG Technologies and advises a boot into safe mode (Reboot your computer into Safe Mode | AVG Support) followed by AVG repair (Repair AVG | AVG Support).
Call me a member of the "better late than never" club: I see you've already switched to Defender.
HTH,
Sorry, but I had to do this to read the OP's screen cap post, so I thought I'd share:
BTW, there's a thread on the AVG support blog that addresses this issue. Startup message about Watchdog Initialization? | AVG It's covered in the post from Kishore/AVG Technologies and advises a boot into safe mode (Reboot your computer into Safe Mode | AVG Support) followed by AVG repair (Repair AVG | AVG Support).
Call me a member of the "better late than never" club: I see you've already switched to Defender.
HTH,
Tried this twice now and the third restart after correcting AVG locks it back up again in this loop
