How to quit Avast temporarily?

I know how to shut-down Avast's shields (the options range from disable for 10 minutes to disable permanently). However, just a few minutes ago, the process AvastSvc*32.exe started consistently hogging 97% of my CPU power. I couldn't kill the process and neither did disabling the shields help in reducing the CPU load.

Though my laptop was connected to a wall outlet, it killed my entire battery (which is quite old). Had I been in a meeting, it would have been the end of the session. I am not sure what triggered the process to go berzerk; all I did a few moments before was to open a Nature link. Restarting the computer has fixed it temporarily.

I would like to be able to quickly kill the process if I need to in an emergency. Google provided the following two links but I am not sure that I have a solution:
(the second link recommends turning off Webshield.ini).

2 Answers

Here's what worked for me:

1. With the Win+ R combo summon services.msc.
2. Right click on the service Avast Antivirus and click Stop.
3. Before it stops, Avast will warn you that the service is being stopped. Only if you are confident that your computer is safe (and are more worried about the Avast using most of your CPU availability) click the Ok button and the service should stop.

After a couple of minutes of stopping it, I restarted Avast. The load it put on my CPU after the restart was normal (i.e. less than 10%).

Well, here's something you could do.

If on Windows Vista/7: open your start menu, type cmd omitting the quotes, right click on cmd (looks like a black icon with c:\ on it) select Run As Administrator

If on Windows 8+: press WinKey + F, type cmd omitting the quotes, right click on cmd (looks like a black icon with c:\ on it) select Run As Administrator

Once in the Command Prompt it should look something like this:

NB: I use Windows 8.1 Update, yours might look slightly different.

Next, we need to type this:

taskkill /F /IM AvastSvc.exe

This tells Windows to launch a command, taskkill (Task Killer), tells taskkill that it needs to /Force the program closed, and that the /IMage name is AvastSvc.exe

Once done, you can safely close the Command Prompt.