I may have a virus that Avast didn’t pick up. I noticed an entry in Startup. When I tried to untick it on the start menu, I was denied access.
My Dumb question: I want to use online scans & Avast’s many little menus in convoluted places… How do I just turn it off & back on again? My other AV’s had one place where you could enable/disable them.
I’ve found stop access protection, pause provider, stop provider, & all the little sub menus. I’ve looked at help file–took a while to find. Jeez!
The right click menu from the icon allows you access to many areas in avast.
Stop On-Access Protection, stops all providers.
Pause Provider, you can select which to pause, it is still running but doesn’t scan, probably the best option. For an on-line scan make your connection to the on-line site first, then pause Web Shield and Standard Shield, start the on-line scan, on completion of the on-line scan, resume the providers. You will notice that selection is now active since you have providers paused.
Stop Provider Terminates a provider a step up from pause and I wouldn’t have thought necessary to achieve what you need.
I think it’s the use of the word “provider” that loses me! So I will attempt to reiterate. “Provider” is used synonomously with each “area of service” the AV performs or provides?
To me a provider is a person or thing that provides something, such as a service. It’s the language that’s locking up my brain!
Are you telling me that pausing the web shield & standard shield is all that needs to be done to run an online AV scan (say for example Trend Micro Housecall)? And the way to accomplish this is through the option Pause the Provider>Webshield & Standard shield on the sub menu?
What is the consequence of Stopping the Provider? Isn’t it the the same thing as disabling or turning Avast off? When you say it “terminates a provider from setup” do you mean it reconfigures the AV rather than disabling it? In other words Stop Provider would be used to discontinue one of the several features (areas of service)? Am I being clear? I don’t want to assume something that’s inacurate.
The providers loosely means the various Shields (Standard, Web, Network, etc.), whilst they all aren’t called ‘something’ Shield they are called providers by avast, see the avast help file, Resident Protection
Resident Protection Providers
avast! resident protection is based on so-called resident providers - special modules protecting various parts of your computer, e.g. file system or e-mail.
If you hover the mouse pointer over the avast icon it will show 7 Provider(s) total, x running.
Are you telling me that pausing the web shield & standard shield is all that needs to be done to run an online AV scan (say for example Trend Micro Housecall)? And that stopping the "provider" is unecessary?
Yes.
Termination and Stop a provider are basically the same, they can extend to after reboot (so it won’t start next time) if you answer Yes to persist the change beyond this session (see image).
So in this way you might accidentally terminate/stop a provider/shield so that it doesn’t start after your next boot. That I would say is a good reason to only pause a provider/shield because even if you forget to resume it, on the next boot it will start as normal.
For the majority of people not all 7 will be running, like Outlook/Exchange which is olny required if you use MS Outlook (not express). The same for P2P Shield and Instant Messaging, if you don’t use those programs you don’t need them enabled and you can terminate/stop them and answer Yes to persist the changes.
The only two providers that would have any direct effect on an on-line scan are the web shield that monitors http traffic and Standard Shield that would scan any content downloaded to your hard disk by the on-line scanner, like signatures and you wouldn’t want standard shield poking around it that. As the on-line scanner opens files to scan them if the standard shied was left on it would also scan the same file, so it has to be paused to avoid conflict. None of the other providers have any interaction with an on-line scan.
Stop/Terminate isn’t a problem as long as you don’t answer Yes or you forget to start it again.
Theoretically you don’t need to pause anything. But, it would at least cause duplication of scanned files as avast checks up on the other scanner. At worst could cause a conflict if a virus was detected which was recognised by both scanners as the fight for control over the infected file.
You don’t have to reboot, having selected No, just use the resume provider or open the on-access scanner window and start it, you will be asked again if you want this to persist, Yes, in this case you do.
David,
You are really knowledgeable about the inner workings of this AV! I just always think in terms of on or off! Lots of food for thought. You guys should sticky this.
Thank you again for sharing with me. I love this forum. I really do. A lot more goes on here than information sharing. :-*