Heuristics

If I set the heuristics sensitivity level of avast! free av 5.1.889 from normal to high,will the scanning engine become more effective?

It may find more issues, but the chances of false positives will also increase. It’s a balancing act. I left mine at default.

By the way the performance will be affected also.

i have mine set to high and performance impact is negligable if anything, i dont notice any diff and i still havent had any FPs even on high, but by the nature of it u will have a higher chance of an FP but u shuld still be fine.

Not really,it depends on the AV company.For instance,ESET got good heuristic engine,low false positives and light on resources(Don’t be misunderstanding,even I am currently using ESET but doesn’t mean that I am not Avast! supporter anymore.That’s why I am still at here.) ,but the reply from superhacker,Gopher John and And are correct too.

I’m using it with High setting and i haven’t had a single false positive. I wish there was a way to use more aggressive settings. I don’t mind a false positive here and there but i do mind stuff getting misseed…

Agree with you. :slight_smile:

Either setting can be detrimental, depending on the action taken by either Avast automatically or by the user. Deleting or moving to the chest of a critical system file due to a false positive can result in a non-functioning system.

even the highest level of heuristics is tested to not generate critical false positives and to run at a reasonable speed…

Are you saying that system files and other files critical to the windows boot process are somehow checked against a database to prevent them from being targeted as a false positive?

of course, they are… there’s no heuristic allowed to produce false positives on important files… and if nothing else, the final check of signature will help :wink:

Thanks, that’s reassuring. :slight_smile:

Maxx, any plans to introduce even more aggressive heuristics? I know some of them are in action like behavioral FileInfector detection which is doing a good job, but other than that i hardly ever seen any kind of proactivity on this end. Now i know you want to keep FP at a very low level but still i’d like to see some more action from it. Slightly more.