Hello everyone, Ive been testing avast! for a day or two now but havent quite had the time to explore the program fully yet…even though I have been trying to get acquainted with some of the forum threads first…
At the moment, its looking like a promising replacement for my current NOD32, which I have to say in its defense works just fine, even though it can be a bit of a nuisance with all its settings but thats another story…
anyway, I have a question about the Network Shield…
I have read and hopefully understood correctly that the Network Shield just “sits there” as an extra layer of defense (IDS)…
I have a software firewall and am also behind a router so was wondering whether I actually needed the NS or not…on further reading, it seems that because it works at the driver level it uses no resources, so I should be able to leave it running just for another layer of security…but…
What I did wonder about, was the fact that as it seems to intercept all network traffic and because it uses signatures, wouldn`t that mean it is in fact potentially causing the data flow to be slowed down to some degree…or not ?
Im thinking the performance hit (if any...as I dont understand the way it works) could be in some way measurable if there`s a lot of traffic, and moreso lots of different simultaneous traffic threads from different sources…ie: checking mail, autorefreshing multiple forums, downloading multiple files, streaming media etc…
Basically, could it be an issue, is what I`m wondering ?
and I`m sure I could have phrased that in two sentences if I really tried ! :
The Network Shield uses very little in the way of resources and whilst I don’t have a router (dial-up) I do have a software firewall and I leave it enabled. There have been a number of occasions reported in the forums where a users firewall was disabled and the network shield provided that important additional level of protection.
Personally I would leave it on if your firewall and router are working normally it shouldn’t have any work to do so won’t be using much in the way of resources. As a dial-up user I don’t see any impact and it isn’t monitoring all traffic just known routes of entry for worms, exploits, etc.
So I don’t know what it is you are monitoring, possibly the Web Shield monitoring http port 80 traffic. Again I don’t see any hit in traffic but that may be different with a fast connection, but for the majority of people that too isn’t an issue.
I’m using Avast Home 4.8.1169. The Network Shield seems to not be working. It shows the following:
Last scanned:
Last infected:
Scanned count: 0
Infected count: 0
Task Name: Resident protection
Run time: 2:53:24
I hear others saying that its OK, its working as it should and will pop up when it detects an attack. I’m not satisfied with that statement, because I had the Web Shield doing this same thing until I found, by luck, instructions on how to set up a proxy in Firefox.
So before I actually entered the required settings for Web Shield, it too was showing the same stats as Network Shield is now, and at the time, I thought Web Shield too was working as it should, but it obviously it wasn’t.
