Yesterday I purchased and installed Captain Optimizer. It was recommended highly by Cloudeight Internet, and I trust those folks totally. Today my scheduled Avast scan ran and the attachment I’ve included shows what the result was. It says it couldn’t scan because it couldn’t find the path. Thing is, these are all Avast files. So can anyone enlighten me? I’ve also written to tech support for Captain Optimizer.
You folks have always been so good to help me out of my little dilemmas, and I appreciate your time and every word you share with me.
I did upgrade to version 6. I have version 6.0.1000.
Is there anyone else out there who can comment on what has happened here? There does not seem to be anything wrong with Avast installation. When I open the program the summary page shows no warnings. It ran it’s scan as it should. I’ll wait to hear if there are any other ideas on this.
Nothing to worry about, those are old virus definitions folders and avast is doing some housecleaning to keep the size used on the hard disk to a minimum. This just happens to have occurred between the time you started the scan and it reaching that old defs folder.
There is nothing to delete, the files aren’t there. “It says it couldn’t scan because it couldn’t find the path.”
Also, there are many legitimate reasons why a file can’t be scanned: Files that can’t be scanned are just that, not an indication they are suspicious/infected, just unable to be scanned.
Many programs (usually security based ones) password protect their files for legitimate reasons such as AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy, there are others (and avast doesn’t know the password or have any way of using it even if it did know it).
When you run scans with the above programs and you delete harmful entries that they detect, a copy is kept (in quarantine/restore/backup) in case you need to reverse what you did. These are usually password protected, you should do some housekeeping and delete old backup/recovery/quarantine entries (older than two weeks or so), this will reduce the numbers of files that can’t be scanned.
By examining 1) the reason given by avast! for not being able to scan the files, 2) the location of the files, you can get an idea of what program they relate to. You may need to expand the column headings to see all the text.
I see, of course. It makes sense if the file path is not found there’s nothing there to delete. Duh!!!
You said I should do some housecleaning and I wouldn’t have a clue how to do that – other than to remove things in the Virus Chest. If there is some kind of maintenance work that I should be doing on my own, manually, would you advise?
The house keeping relates to other reasons for files not being able to be scanned, those security applications that password protect their quarantine/restore/backup date and the only ting to do is periodically clear out old items.
You obviously don’t have to do that if you aren’t seeing these in the listings of files that can’t be scanned.
I know what you mean now. I used to get that all the time with my scans in BitDefender; files that couldn’t be scanned and were actually items in the SUPERAntiSpyware Quarantine folder. I haven’t had that with Avast.
So anyway, thanks for all your help and tutoring. I do think at this point that this Captain Optimizer might be a program better used by those more knowledgeable.