Until you get to know it a little better leave it on the default settings, which provide a good balance between protection and performance.
Then if there is a particular question about a Provider/Shield as a question, the avast help file, resident protection is also good source of information.
You can’t, it is part of the ‘price’ you pay for using the Home free version. You aren’t forced to upgrade to the Pro version, however if you do that single ad wouldn’t be there.
For the luv of God, please find a way for the Boot Time Scan to be done in Windows x64! This is the ONLY thing keeping me from fully going to WIndows x64. (I’ve been testing WIndows 7 RC x64, which has run so nice… but the unavailability of the boot time scan is SORELY missed!
Set the shield levels to high for real-time protection (of course you can customize the on-access settings there according to your needs, if you don’t have any idea on those settings, just leave the shields at high level). Do full system scans with archive scanning turned on (“arşiv taraması” in Turkish) and the thorough scan option (“eksiksiz tarama” in Turkish). You may select the option “Check for full screen applications before displaying popups” (“Açılır pencere göstermeden önce tam ekran uygulamalarını denetle”) from “Troubleshooting” (“Sorun bulma”) part of the program settings (not on-access protection settings). Also you should increase the maximum size of the chest for a single file from the program settings.
It doesn’t decrease system performance noticeably (actually not at all on my systems) when the shields are set to high. Standard shield level is important for me actually. With normal level, it doesn’t scan mp3 files for example. And this is a bad case for those who use peer to peer applications. I have some friends who gave up using avast! because of missing malicious mp3 files (which are detected by manual scan), even though i told them it was because of the level of the standard shield (p2p and im shields work with standard shield). And this lack of scanning some extensions isn’t limited with mp3 files. It’s better to have an antivirus program that blocks malware in the first place.
This is up to user, though (depending on his/her usage purposes and system resources). Let her/him use with both normal and high settings, if s/he notices a performance impact on her/his system, then s/he can stick with normal level. But i don’t think unless s/he has a old granny computer. ;D Btw, s/he asked for the best settings, which means “the highest settings” for most of the users who seem like novice asking so many basic questions. ;D
That’s the problem not everyones’ system is the same as yours, mine would probably give yours a run for its money and I see no need whatsoever to set the Standard Shield to High
You can modify the standard shield Scanner Advanced settings, adding the MP3 extension to those scanned by default, this will scan the MP3 files but not the other non-critical files. This will in effect set the standard shield to Custom, with less overhead but still scanning your mp3 files.
Well depending if they are using a supported P2P application avast will scan the content. If the P2P application is half decent then you can also have it have avast scan the downloaded files, that is done by ashQuick.exe and not by the standard shield, so ‘all’ files are scanned.
If you have any other file types you want scanned in the standard shield then add them as I mentioned above.