Cons of turning off standard shield

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Just been experimenting and noticed all the files that get scanned by standard shield when you do the simplest of things and also surprised how many dlls etc get scanned opening programs.

I’ve also found a quite pronounced improvement in pc performance with standard shield turned off so…

if i have all the other ‘shields’ up and running is it ok to run the pc with standard shield turned off? What are the cons of doing so?

Just to explain my situation a little more - if i have the web shield running and i’m using no other media - cds, mem cards, floppies, usb drives - the only way files can get on to my pc is via the web. So if i have the web shield running wouldn’t i be safe as the only possible route of infection is via the web? (i also have zonealarm firewall running)

As long as i have the right click ‘scan ?’ option for use when i do use other media which is rare shouldn’t i be ok?

Just curious

2

The con, you are more at risk to infection, it’s that simple.

The web shield doesn’t stop everything it only scans http traffic, port 80 by default, so if something uses a different port or protocol other than http then it can’t be scanned. The standard shield is a fall back in scanning newly created or modified files.

I don’t even know if terminating the standard shield would have a direct impact on the other shields as it is the main scanning engine ashServ.exe. I have never tried and I’m not about to compromise my system to test it.

You don’t give us any information about the standard shield sensitivity settings (Normal, High, Custom, etc.) or your system CPU, RAM, etc. to rty and see why there might be an issue with performance ?

What other security software are you running ?

3

Think of this scenario

Yesterday a new, undetected, trojan downloaded to your computer.

Today a detection is added.

Beginning today the Standard Shield will catch this trojan far all users with that provider active.

Since your Standard Shield is turned off the trojan runs rampant for the following week until your scheduled Friday scan is run. Your bank information travels to several foreign countries.

Someone in Mongolia is now watching the plasma TV your paying for.