Few Specific Questions Regarding AVAST from an AVG user shifting over!

Hi,

I was using AVG 7.5 till date because of the low RAM usage. I am running 128 MB RAM on a P4 1.6 Ghz with XP SP2. I have a Dial up internet connection. I use spybot 1.6, and Kerio personal firewall ad Outlook express as my email client.

After I migrated to AVG 8 I found that it was slowing down the system terribly. I am planning to shift to AVAST personal for a trial. I need to know a couple of things.

  1. AVG was running 4 processes in the background the Memory usage ( not Virtual Memory ) was around 4MB. How much of Mem usage can I expect with AVAST ? ( I know it differs in different systems but give me an approx with an idle system. )

  2. When I run trusted programs that are RAM intensive I used to kill all four processes of AVG. With AVG 8 however I cannot stop two processes. ( the resident shield and another, they can’t be disabled from the Services dialog either, I guess they run on a layer below the OS )
    Can I stop All AVAST processes including resident shield to save RAM, assuming I am offline and I am running a trusted
    program, or will I be unable to stop certain processes.

  3. What will be the average size of the updates in MB assuming I update once a week. ( remember I use dialup )

  4. Will I be able to use Gmail pop3 services with the AVAST Email scanner.

  5. AVAST has a scanning component I heard that scans before Windows loads or while windows loads ( i.e during startup ) is there an option to inactivate this feature If needed.

I looked through most of the forum for answers BEFORE posting, I did not find anything on Q2 and on the others the answers were very varied.

I’d appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks :slight_smile:

More than that… AVG hides some memory usage on its drivers protecting the kernel mode and invisible for the user…

Right click the ‘a’ blue icon and disable the providers (stop protection). Which remains, services and the icon aren’t significant in resources.

They’re incremental and daily (sometimes more than once per day). Generally, few bytes.

Only using a 3rd party called Stunnel. First of all, it’s not possible because Gmail uses SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connections. Avast mail scanner doesn’t support SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connections. But take a look here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=10428.0 to see how to set up secure email with avast!.

There is an explanation of this here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=28150.msg229981#msg229981

The boot time scanning is manually scheduled, you can unscheduled.

5. AVAST has a scanning component I heard that scans before Windows loads or while windows loads ( i.e during startup ) is there an option to inactivate this feature If needed.

This may be a misunderstanding of a couple of avast functions apart from the boot time scan that can be scheduled and runs before the system is in normal operational state.

  1. avast does perform some scanning of files (as part of its normal on access scanning) during startup. You can see how many files have been scanned in the information provided by the Standard Shield. For normal users running with the recommended “Normal” scanning level this does not affect system startup noticeably.

  2. after each system restart (currently 8 minutes after startup) avast performs a rootkit scan of the system. Details of this may be found in the aswar.log file in the avast log folder including the total run time (on my system 3 seconds). If you feel, for whatever reason, that you need to prevent this protection then it may be disabled in the “Troubleshooting” section of the avast “Program Settings” menu.

  1. Will I be able to use Gmail pop3 services with the AVAST Email scanner.

do you need it…all Gmails are scanned for virus and spam by POSTINI

http://www.postini.com/

[i]‘pondus’; scanning for viruses and spam is ‘apples and oranges’… Scanning with AVAST! as well as having been scanned by Gmail is ‘safety in numbers’…

‘halsted’; there is another way without installing ‘stunnel’…

You indicated that you’re using a dialup connection… Does that ISP allow standard, NOT SSL, POP3 download of email? ??? If it does; ‘auto-forward’ email from Gmail to that email account and let it be scanned by AVAST!..

For example; I use Netscape as my ISP… I ‘auto-forward’ my Gmail to my Netscape email address and download it from there… Thus it’s scanned not only by Gmail but also by AVAST! when downloaded into my email client… No muss, no fuss!

Side note; as a former AVG user; you’ll love the simplicity of using AVAST! ;)[/i]

Can we rely on it when scanning is the job? Which engine (virus program) does it use?

Have no idea !!

Hotmail = Trend Micro
Yahoo = Norton
Gmail = Postini ???..send mail to postini and ask ?
my ISP BKK = Barracuda spam firewall ( ClamWin i think )

Gmail =

If Postini detects a virus it will add the X-pstnvirus header with the virus name. Postini uses two different virus scanned to detect viruses, McAfee and Authentium Antivirus.

http://www.google.no/search?hl=no&q=postini+virus+engine&btnG=Google-søk&meta=

Thanks. Good engines :wink: