Solution: Avast & hardware monitor crashes, etc...

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Thought I'd share this nugget of intel having spent the last few hours drilling down through the list of possible causes for some BSOD issues I was hitting.

 

Scenario:

- Gigabyte Z97 Sniper MB

- Intel CPU

- Gigabyte - System information viewer installed

- Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) installed

- Avast anti-virus installed

 

Symptoms:

- Intel XTU was not providing the CPU frequency and also reported it was being blocked from reading some information (but not crashing)

- System information viewer was running when first installed (before any AV installs) but some weeks later (after no use) was BSOD crashing when run

 

Cause:

- Avast uses something called "hardware assisted virtualization" which obviously conflicts with these utilities

 

Solution: Avast (2015)

- Open Avast user interface (ie: double click the avast system tray icon)

-> Settings

-> Troubleshooting

-> Un-tick/select "Enable hardware-assisted virtualization" option**

 

 

** There are warnings about doing this and the effect this change will have for things like sandbox so it may be something you choose to do when you need to do hardware monitoring tasks and then re-enable during "normal" usage.

 

Result:

- Intel XTU now reads and shows the CPU frequency in its monitor display

- Gigabyte System Information Viewer no longer BSOD crashes

 

Additional notes:

I strongly suspect this issue extends to other hardware utilities for things like monitoring, overclocking, etc, and on numerous other motherboard types, etc... So, if you see any others that apply, please tag them on so others can find the issue and solution. Thanks

 

Keywords (just to help others searching for this issue):

anti virus, crash, blue screen, cpu, processor, monitoring, hardware