I would give yourself time to get used to the program before tweaking it to within an inch of its life ;D

The avast default settings are a good balance between protection and performance.

My avast providers (that are required I don’t use P2P nor Instant Messaging application’s, so I have those providers Terminated). I have the Web Shield and Internet Mail providers set to High the remainder are set to Normal, the default.

I would say the place to start is the avast help file, Resident protection.