Hi Tech
I don’t think you’re being rude - just careful. It depends on circumstances. Japazo hasn’t given any specs for the “older computer” in question but he does say “I just dont want to end up turning everything off and being left with a completely open machine”
The configuration I suggested is, as I said, for “586 and early Pentiums”, as an alternative to having no active protection at all, and has been refined over a period of years.
BTW I forgot to mention it but I also have unchecked “Scan created/modified files”, in the second tab of Standard Shield settings but not “Scan files on open” as I thought this would leave the machines too vulnerable.
The specs:
Notebook: Cyrix MediaGX (586) 200mhz, 64MB RAM, 1.7GB HDD PIO Mode 3, Windows 98SE
Desktop: Centaur/IDT Winchip C6 200mhz, 48MB RAM, 8.4GB HDD PIO Mode 4, Windows 95OSR2
Internet: Cable, NAT router/firewall
I use the Cyrix notebook every day, mainly with Firefox 1.5, Windows Remote Desktop, MSN Messenger, MS Word 2000. Loading all the Avast shields on these machines, especially the ones that won’t be used or are incompatible with Win9X, increases startup time and they then have to be paged-out anyway when other apps are launched.
Yes, the “free 3MB required for ‘Skins’” is HD space.
Re: merging icons, you may be right about that. It’s so long since I disabled VRDB that I might have just done it just to remove an extra icon from the tray.
Re: updating. This is my choice. iAVS updating takes between 7 and 15 minutes on these machines, during which they continue to be usable but at about half their normal speed (which makes sense as ‘Wintop’ tells me that Avast.setup is using up to 50% CPU resources). Program updates take 25 to 40 minutes. I just prefer to do these things when I know I won’t be using the computer.
As I said, these configurations represent satisfactory use of Avast as an alternative to “turning everything off” or having NO AV at all. By all means question them and adjust them to suit your circumstances.