Heuristics Sensitivity

I like to have this set to HIGH for each shield for top protection but i am wondering is it better to just set it to NORMAL? What has everyone else set it to and for what reasons?

Taken from AVASTS help…you can find this on the bottom right with this (?) as icon.it explains everything about the program and its features along with their settings…this is what heuristics do :"As well as the standard process of scanning for known malware infections, avast! also performs a heuristic analysis to identify potential, but as yet unknown malware. This is done by looking for certain characteristics that may be a sign of a potential infection. By clicking on the orange bars, you can adjust the level of heuristics sensitivity to Low, Normal or High, or you can turn it off completely. Increasing the sensitivity, increases the chances are of detecting a virus but also the likelihood of “false positives”. "

ive set it to “high” and it hasnt find any false positives yet,so i will leave it as it is…now for you,i suggest you to set it to high and if it finds too many false positives(for example programs you use and you know they are clean) then setting it to normal may solve the problem :wink:

yeah, confirming that setting it to high doesn’t generate FPs here, and I’ve done that for months now.

+1

Yeah same here, had heuristics set to max for about 6 months now, no FPs.

The same here :slight_smile:

But personally I would like to have more aggressive heuristics. I wouldn’t mind a few false positives on the highest heuristic setting :wink:

Greetz, Red.

The reasons behind setting it to above normal are pretty obvious; To catch things that haven’t been discovered yet. There is an obvious setback of a potential False Positive (that current Avast users seemingly haven’t had problems with too much, judging by the responses so far).

If you’re willing to risk the fact that you might have a false-positive occasionally while making sure that your computer might not get the latest computer virus, then go set it to HIGH. If not, keep it at NORMAL and you probably won’t have to worry about FP’s too much. then again, you might get a new virus.

Up to you I guess.

I have it set to High ever since and i haven’t got a single false positive so far because of it. So having it set to High is the obvious choice.