Avast offers quite a few different products ranging from their free antivirus right to their Avast Premium Security package that throws in all user’s needs for PC security.
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In this, you can find everything to fight viruses and malware, and to keep you safe online; they throw in the Avast SecureLine VPN.
One of the issues many users have is the install size of these products, particularly the Premium.
One place you can find useful information is the Avast community forum, as there are users with all manner of varying systems and installations.
If you are interested in using these Avast products, or you already use it and wish to understand how much space these products use, you can run through this guide for a good understanding.
How Big is Avast?
Before looking at the installation’s size on your hard drive, it is better to take a look at the Premium product in a bit more detail.
One other thing to note is that many users opt for the Avast free; however, this is known to harvest your data and share it with third parties. (Read Why Is My Avast VPN Not Working)
To stop this, you can do the following two steps:
- Go to Settings – Privacy then uncheck Participate in the Avast community
- Go to Settings – Privacy then uncheck Participate in data sharing
Besides this, you have two options for the installer for Avast. First is the online installer, and then second, the offline installer. Offline is recommended as there is a difference in the size of 7 MB compared to 258 MB (Not space on your computer after install).
Avast Premier has all the features of the free, including all of the following:
- Cleanup Premium: Can clean up junk files, cleans entries registry entries, and applies optimized settings to inefficient settings of your computer.
- Data Shredder: Shredder will safely delete folders and files you don’t want anyone to see or you have finished with.
- Driver Updater: You see, this is an additional subscription service responsible for downloading and installing official drivers for your computer components.
- SecureLine VPN: Also, an additional service responsible for securing your online presence by encrypting your transmissions and hiding location by changing your IP address.
- Sandbox: You can run suspicious software in a sandboxed or protected environment.
- Wi-Fi Inspector: Scans wireless networks to see if anything can harm your device. It can also show every device connected to the same wireless network.
- Sensitive Data Shield: Secures sensitive data like payroll or other personal data from unauthorized access.
- Webcam Shield: Stops anyone accessing your webcam to spy upon you.
- Software Updater: Regularly check to see if your installed apps are up to date. If not, it informs you and asks for permission to update as required.
- Passwords: Password Manager to secure and encrypt passwords.
Once you install everything, you can see the 258 MB installation file increases on your hard drive to around 1.5 GB in space.
You can see from the user forum this varies from 1.05GB up to 1.92 GB.
Here is an example user on the SR member posts forums who has an install size of 1.13GB disk space used. (Read Chrome Safemode)
“Windows 10 Home 2004 64bit/ Acer Aspire F15/ Intel Core i5 7200U 2 5GHz, 8GB DDR4 memory, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD/ avast! free 20 8 2432 (build 20.8.5684.602) UI-1.0.564/ WinPatrol+/ Firefox, uBlock Origin, uMatrix/ MailWasher Pro/ Avast! Mobile Security”
How Long Does it Take to Install Avast Antivirus?
You will find the Avast offline installer installs faster than the online installer. (Read Avast Says My Router is Not Configured Correctly)
Depending on the Avast Antivirus software you are installing, it can take 3 minutes up to 30 minutes. You can find some users record a couple of hours, though this sort of time isn’t natural.
Do I Need to Uninstall McAfee Before Installing Avast?
Whenever you install any Antivirus software, you should always remove any previous antivirus software applications. Only the integrated Windows software won’t clash with commercially paid for products.
You can find, if you tried to install McAfee, then Avast would show this as suspicious software and block the installation.
Even if it were possible, you could end up with many false positives, computer crashes, and a severe slowdown in computer performance.
When you uninstall your old antivirus, you can use the built-in uninstaller, though these can leave traces of the previous installation.
It is recommended to use a dedicated uninstaller such as the free Revo Uninstaller (also available as a portable version). You can use this, and it will search for files and registry entries the Avast uninstaller misses.
How Much Ram Does Avast Use?
Once you begin running Avast, you can check to see how much RAM the software uses. When idle, it uses around 128 MB of RAM. Although, as it begins to run any of the scans, or you run one of the other applications, this can increase. (Read How To Put Avast In Passive Mode)
In most cases, the scans consume the most and generate lots of hard drive activity. If your computer has a mechanical hard drive, you can find your computer unusable as it slowly works its way through all your files and folders.
Many Avast users will set this to automatic when they can leave their system on when not in use.
If you purchase this software package to make use of the Avast SecureLine VPN, there are many other options of dedicated VPN services that use much less RAM and thus less impact on your computer performance.
Besides, many of the products you find in the Avast offering can be found with other alternatives that don’t harvest your details and pass these on to third parties. A premium VPN is one such application, which does keep you safe online.
