I have made a silent computer, no fans, etc. and have disabled any regular hard drive access from the OS on idle. I have Vista. I want to install Avast but what I want to know is if it accesses the hard drive etc in idle (background scanning or whatever) and can that be disabled? Also when scanning running processes, does it load up the database in memory or does it access it from the hard drive. my only issue here is noise. thanks.
You need to disable VRDB (virus recovery database) creation when the computer is idle. You can set it to be created when the screen saver is running or even disabling it.
There is no background scanning (even scheduling on Home version).
Better if you set the Standard Shield sensitivity level to ‘Normal’ and uncheck the option to scan open/created/modified files.
Welcome to the one of the most configurable antivirus round 8)
avast! doesn’t scan running processes, but rather the executable files when they are loaded from disk to memory. So this part shouldn’t really matter to you. The virus database is allocated in memory, but of course it’s up to the operating system whether it swaps it to disk or keeps it in memory - the same goes to all avast! executable modules (exe, dll).
Regarding other file access… well, you’d probably want to disable VRDB generation. Then, avast! performs significant disk access when updating it’s virus database or program files - I don’t think you can do anything about it, other than disable the automatic updates.
If your system is working than avast will scan files that are loaded so there would already be a disk access to load the file so there would be no other additional disk activity because of avast. As Tech said the VRDB is one occasion that avast may scan you HDD to compile a new VRDB database to help protect your system.
This normally only happens once every three weeks (default) and I have mine set to run when my screen saver is running, since I never use a screen saver the VRDB never runs automatically; instead I do a manual ‘Generate VRDB Now’ as a part of my regular system maintenance, so I do it at a time convenient to me and it doesn’t take that long.
If your HDDs are quiet (Seagate are some of the quietest) then any disk activity is unlikely to be an issue unless you are sitting on top of your system listening.