Compressed file resident scanning and network shield compatibility

I’m a new avast user. (I am currently using the free version.) I just want to know if avast’s Network Shield is compatible with the Windows XP SP1 firewall? Also, is it possible to configure avast’s resident scanner to scan opened compressed files as well?

Network Shield is compatible with all firewalls. It doesn’t replace them,but only supliments them.

You can set Standard Shield to scan archives only in avast! Professional Edition,but in my opinion,this is just a waste of system power. You have to extract files to be useful anyway and then they are intercepted by regular Standard Shield scan methods.

Network Shield is a protection against known Internet worms/attacks. It analyses all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents. It can be also taken as a lightweight firewall (or more precisely, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System).

Network Shield protects you from internet worms that spread themselves via various security holes in your system. Typicaly these kind of viruses don’t infect files but instead they attack running processes on your PC (either Windows components or some server programs like SQL Server, IIS etc.). These kind of attacks are not easily catched by ordinary antivirus during file or mail scanning. It is not a duplicate work with Standard Shield.

On anything of speed <= 100 mbps the performance penalty should be negligible (unless you have very old hardware). On gigabit/10gigabit networks it may slowi things down considerably though. Few people are using these speeds to access the Internet…

Basically, it covers all Internet worms. Such as Win32.CodeRed, Win32.SQLSlammer, Win32.Blaster, in32.Welchia (Nachi) and Win32.Sasser.