I’ve been a proud user of Avast! home edition for a while now , and it works really neat for me. I have a question though, which i wasn’t able to find an answer to in the FAQ section.
So- DOES the Avast! antivirus include heuristic detection in the real time protection, or does it only rely on it’s database of viruses? I know it has some kind of heuristics while processing email,but does that apply to real time protection (or at least to on-demand scan) as well?
Hi,
I beleive that ‘on access scanner’ works just on its VPS database of known viruses which is updated regularly. They do have very good ‘generic’ definition files which detect whole groups of viruses but not true heuristics.
The e mail part of Avast does warn of ‘potential’ viruses if you receive an exe, vbs, scr attacment or if e mails are sent in a certain way but true heuristics look in to the file. Of course they give false alarms as well.
Nod 32 antivirus is one of the best for heuristics. I just use avast and use http://virusscan.jotti.dhs.org/ if I want to double check a file. Avast has not let me down so far 
Best Wishes
Jlo
No, only email processing has heuristics.
Welcome to avast forums! 8)
Hi!
May i ask why avast standard shield doesnt use heuristics? I mean, is there a specific reason? It seems that almost all other anti-virus products use heuristics for the real time protection…
Nod 32 antivirus is one of the best for heuristics. I just use avast and use http://virusscan.jotti.dhs.org/ if I want to double check a file. Avast has not let me down so far
@ Jlo
New link for Jotti is http://virusscan.jotti.org/, you might want to update your favourites.
I don’t think that almost all the other AVs use heuristics (there are an awful lot that don’t).
My own personal opinion is that you get more false positives using heuristics so they should be used with care as they can potentially reap just as much havoc as a real virus. Using heuristics with email has less potential for system harm as at worst it deletes an email incorrectly, that can always be sent again (assuming you know who sent it).
For the most part a major source of virus infection is email attachments.
Norton,Mcafee and PC cillin real time scanners perform heuristics scanning.