How can I disable the Microsoft office scan?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I work at home as a medical transcriptionist and work on 2 different platforms that are Word-based. When I try and open Word to start typing I am having to wait a bit for it to open. The IT person with my company said that I need to disable the Microsoft office scan. How can I do that?

TIA ;D

2

Hello southernpeach

this forum is for problems regarding avast. come back if you have any.

3

I understand that and I have Avast. He told me that I could disable Avast from scanning Word every time I opened it. Again, if that is possible, how can I do that?

4

I would say it isn’t advisable to do that as word/office documents have macros and are a potential target.

You don’t say what setting you have the Standard Shield set to (Normal is the default) ?
Mind you I believe even on Normal, because of the macros, they would still be scanned.

Can you tell us a little about your system:
What version of avast are you using ?
What Operating system ?
What Office version ?
What CPU do you have and How much RAM ?

Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?

5

Hi David,

The Standard Shield is on normal. I am running Avast version 4.8 home edition, XP Professional, Word 2003, Pentium 4CPU, 1.60GHz, 768 mb RAM.

Thank you!

6

Well with your settings and your system it should be up to the task.

However, you didn’t answer the most important question about other/previous AVs as that can have a major impact on performance if not removed or remnants are left after an uninstall.

7

Sorry about that. I had AVG probably 4-5 years ago and actually I am not sure how it was removed. At the time, I had someone who worked on my computer who replaced AVG with the Avast.

8

If you have been using avast for that long ?
4 to 5 years ago AVG’s uninstaller was relatively good unlike avg8 which seemed to leave remnants behind.

So if you have had avast for some time has this only just started ?
If so what has changed recently ?

What other security software do you have (anti-spyware, etc.) ?

9

I don’t believe there is a way to stop real-time scanning for individual programs in Avast. There may be but I’m unaware of it; I think it’s either all or nothing. You could temporarily pause the Standard Shield when you open Word, but that would pretty much defeat the purpose of having an antivirus, and it could be easy to forget to turn it back on. But you might at least be able tell if it’s Avast slowing you down. When you open Word, does the Avast icon spin the whole time you’re waiting?

How long exactly do you have to wait? 768 MB of RAM is not too bad for XP as long as you don’t try to do too many things at once. A little bit of a wait might not be unreasonable.

10

Thanks so much David and Norel for trying to help but I am moving on. I have received some pretty ugly messages on this forum for posting and have even been told that I should not be running the home edition because I work from home. Thanks again.

11

You’re welcome.

If you feel that the messages were pretty ugly, or offensive, you can always report them, there is a link in every message.

However, it is a fact that the Home version is for Home and non-commercial use and both must apply. So any work related use be it from home or elsewhere means you should be using the Pro version.

12

Hi southernpeach

there are some hidden tasks in office programs launch time that cannot be disabled using Microsoft Office Options and need tweak tools or you know windows registry very well.

if you want faster launch for Office programs you need to:

Disable Customer Experience Improvement program
Disable logging Microsoft Office activity
Disable error reporting

and for Microsoft Office Word:

Do not check if MS Word is the default HTML Editor

with disabling these tasks in Microsoft Office, those programs would run much more faster, for example in ms office word launch time every time it take seconds to check it it’s Default HTML editor or no, but it take less than 1 second to avast! scan it. Exclude Microsoft Office Folder from being scanned by avast! would not be solution for your problem. :slight_smile:

(for doing above tasks you can use this program: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/boost-speed it’s not free, but you can install it in trial version and do what you need :wink: )