Downloaded and installed free Avast! last Sunday. So far I love it!! Got fed up with AVG.
Under File System Shields there are shields such as Real Time Shield that says:
“show report file” . Clicking on it shows a notepad with info in it. I noticed that these report files are showing on every file system shield. I’m afraid that these notepads can over time become very large and would like to avoid that if possible.
Now my questions are:
Can I delete these notepad files and is it safe to do so and if so: how? ( I don’t see anywhere a delete button)
If I cannot delete these files, can the information inside these notepads be deleted safely without repercussions?
See, I like my PC as clean as possible without unnecessary junk added to it.
You shouldn’t need to clean then and you would have to disable the avast self defence module to do that.
Open the avast Settings, Maintenance section and in the auto cleanup lower the duration of scan logs, I have mine at 7 days and temporary scan logs at 7 and 1 day respectively. In the LOGS lower the maximum size, I have mine set to 128KB
Thank you so much for your clear and speedy answer. 8) I’ve changed the logs to show them like yours. Makes sense now. I see I need to learn a lot about Avast!
Just have a rummage round the avastUI and settings (don’t change anything you aren’t sure of how it might effect things) and you will soon get used to the User Interface and what configurations it has. The help Center (help file) is another area to have a browse around and see just what the things are within the avastUI that you might not be sure of.
Yes, I’ve been peeking around in the GUI and lots of things in there. If I have another question I’ll be posting again for sure. Yes I did read the help file and info about Avast! prior to downloading and installing it.
Because they’re not subject to the file-size limits, as David noted, avast’s “system” logs, like setup.log and especially the one relating to rootkit scans (I forget its name) can grow monstrously large, many megs. In both cases I periodically trim both down to the most recent week or two to keep the sizes semi-reasonable.
If you have to trouble-shoot a new problem, it’s highly unlikely that older log entries will be relevant to it.
The aswAR1.log is probably the one you are thinking of (I periodically delete the aswAR1.log file, it gets created during the AR scan if required), my aswAr.log doesn’t get very big.
I did find aswAR1.log in Avast so wouldn’t have any problems in deleting info in there when the log is growing too big. Rootkit isn’t it?
However, I can’t find the correct “setup.log”. Could you tell me where I can find it so that I can also delete part of it when it’s growing too big a file? I saw 2 setups so I want to make sure it’s the right one when deleting part of the info in it.
Generally all the logs are in the same place (where you found the aswAR1.log), but the setup.log is in two locations and for the most part will be the same, unless you have multiple users. So one will also be in the C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\Setup folder.
I’ve changed the logs to show them like yours. Makes sense now. I see I need to learn a lot about Avast!