At the end of each year, the antivirus software companies release their new software in anticipation of increased sales during the holidays and the festive season. I use avast antivirus for the protection of my Windows computers and the mobile devices and I also update the products to the latest version near the year end. One of the benefits of renewing or purchasing the avast antivirus software license during this time is that many online stores give you great deals and sometimes you get the product as low as 50% of its regular price. But before you install the new version of the antivirus, you should clean off the older version properly to avoid any conflicts and related problems.
As far as avast antivirus is concerned, you can use their official uninstallation utility called avast Clear to remove all the traces of avast antivirus from your Windows PC. This free and portable utility avast Clear is very small in size and must be run in the safe mode of Windows for the uninstallation of avast products. The same utility can be used to remove all the editions of avast antivirus from your PC, including the free version.
Unlike some other similar programs, you do not have to reboot into the safe mode manually – avast Clear handles everything by itself. When you launch the downloaded avastclear.exe file, it asks you to reboot the Windows in the safe mode. You can choose Yes to make it reboot Windows in the safe mode.
Once in the safe mode, you can relaunch the avast Clear utility once again. Chances are not very high that you have installed avast antivirus in some other location than the default one, but if you have then you can choose the installation folder. You can also choose the edition of avast antivirus on your PC – even though the avast Clear utility can detect it automatically. Then clicking on the Uninstall button will remove the selected avast product completely from your PC.
Conclusion: Not really necessary, but you can clean the older versions of avast antivirus from your Windows PC before downloading and installing a new version. This will help avoid any files version conflicts in your PC in the future.
You can download avast Clear from https://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility.