When performing a full system scan is it better to…
(A) Always turn off system restore beforehand?
(B) Perform the scan in safe mode?
Thanks in advance!
For me, both^^
Good luck^^
There is no need to turn off system restore. (The scan will take a bit longer).
If you turn off system restore, you then loose all your restore points. If the computer is running well and you don’t need those points, you can turn it off, but I still wouldn’t recommend it, from the standpoint that if something goes wrong, you have more limited options, unless you’ve made a backup with something like Acronis.
You can remove all but the last System Restore point by using Disk Cleanup then More Options then click Clean up…
As for running it in safe mode, no. If anything is found that Avast is unable to remove, and investigation indicates it should be removed (if in doubt ask at the forum) it is better to run a boot scan.
There is no requirement for either, scan from normal mode is fine. Only if you experience a problem on a detection, which can’t be dealt with in normal mode, file in use, protected, etc. Then you can use a boot-time or safe mode scan, depending on your OS; for old OSes, win9x/ME (or 64bit OS) you would have to run a scan from safe mode; for newer OSes the Boot-Time scan is a better choice.
Disabling system restore before a scan clears all your restore points, so you lose what limited potential of being able to use system restore to possibly resolve a computer problem. So it wouldn’t be advisable to do this on a regular basis.
Periodically cleaning out old restore points (as YoKenny mentions) would recover some HDD space, if you have plenty even that isn’t critical. What you can do is limit the size for system restore so old restore points would effectively fall off the bottom when that size restriction is reached.