I recently installed Avast 4.8 Home Edition - Free Edition on my Windows XP.
When I first installed Avast, it started to do a complete scan. However, I stopped it when it started to scan my External Hard Drive.
I like to do a daily Scan, but only of my C Drive. I haven’t been able to find any way to Scan my computer daily (or otherwise.) Everything on my External Drive is scanned before it’s saved on that drive.
Will somebody please help this “computer idiot” figure out how to do a daily scan of only the selected Drive???
Scheduled scanning isn’t a default option in the Home version, a manual scan needs to be set up and allowed to run.
To scan a particular drive (and only that drive) right click the tray icon (bottom right of your screen) and select “start avast antivirus”. A memory test will occur (~30sec) and the interface will open.
Click the menu, mouse over “start scan” then “select scan area” then click “local folders”. An explorer window will open, place a tick in the drive you want scanned, then “OK” out of it.
Select the scan level either in the interface, or by clicking “menu” again and repeating the above steps for “scan level” (standard is recommended, a thorough scan scans all files, infectable or not. Ditto archive files. Such a scan would take quite a long time. Only select thorough and archive files if you are prepared for the scan to take several hours, depending on the size of the drive.)
Unattended scanning is not possible. Once the first (if any) malware is detected, the scan will pause, awaiting your input on what to do with it. (This is a pain if you’ve gone to bed and wake up to find the scan 5% complete, awaiting your instruction on something.)
A workaround is to place a test virus (code designed to test the AV is working correctly but isn’t actually an infection) near the beginning of the scanned area. When it is detected, the alert window will open. The option “no action” and “don’t show me this next time” should be selected, and any detections found can be actioned at the end of the scan.
A test virus can be found at http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm (download the “eicar.com” -68b). If you choose to do this, you will have to pause the web shield to download it, and pause the standard shield while moving it to the windows folder. (Don’t forget to resume them afterward!)
Thank you for your welcome to the forum and especially for your wonderful and detailed reply !! I saved your reply to my desktop and immediately tried it and it worked great.
I tried to reply to you sooner, but the avast site was having problems.
