lockup on eicar detection with win98

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

although i’m fairly new to avast and it works fine on my xp box i put it on a friends 98 machine as i’ve been impressed on mine.
When i proudly went “and to prove its working, i’ll download this eicar test virus and watch what happens” nothing happened when i initially saved it as a.com.
Thinking i had done it wrong i recreated it and then avast popped up the warning in the bottom right of the screen and then the entire machine locked up and i had to cold boot the system.
on booting i then ran eicar.com, the text was displayed on screen (shouldn’t do!) and then the machine locked up ( could move mouse but clicking had no effect). after about 60 secs or more eventually the virus warning popped up asking me if i wanted to move it to the chest etc.

This leaves me with a worried feeling. Should avast work on 98 and any ideas why a) it locks up and b) seems to allow me to download a virus without detection?
open ended q’s i know but…

2

It’s the almighty feature of Winows 98 to lockup without any reason.
God save all Win9x users.
Sorry for stupid post,i just couldn’t resist ;D
I’m not sure for the first problem,but try moving Sensitivity slider of Standard Shield to High in order to detect viruses on Copy/Create events.

3

i know what you mean about 98 - i’m trying to persuade them to upgrade to xp and a new computer but time will tell.

4

I just don’t have that many probs with 98SE and in any case that doesn’t solve prob of lockup on eicar test. It happened to me a few times - tried several adjustments to avast to no avail so have switched to AntiVir even tho’ it doesn’t have dedicated email scan.

Stom

5

Can you describe the actions (resulting in the lockup) more in detail, please?
In particular - what browser did you use to download eicar? How did you start it - from Explorer, command.com prompt, of some other file manager?

Additionally - what are your settings of the Standard Shield provider? (scanning of created/modified files, scanning files “on open”, displaying the detailed info on performed action, …)
Thanks.

6

Have had the eicar test file on my system for couple of years. Use it to test AV progs on occasion. Set Avast to scan all files then opened eicar file with Explorer context “Send To” to check if scan found it. On each try, Avast showed a full screen warning with a message bar across the bottom and the system totally froze - had to power-down and restart. First time any scanner has done that to me :((
Stom