hello, this is my first post here.
please excuse bad spelling, as i am severly LD in language (some even call it dyslexia)
Ive stopped using AVG free, as it would show my VST synthisizers as trogans each time i did a scan. I know they are virus free, as they are from a big name source.
anyways, what I liked about it was that it did daily virus scans.
how would I go about setting this up in Avast home edition?
I also have questions about it running in Ubuntu, but i will go ask them in the linux/unix area.
thanks in advance
With a whole slew of resident scanners the need for a daily scan is much lessened.
These automated options are only available in the Pro version. This is a limitation of the Home (free) version that it has interactive input requirement, there have to be differences in the Home/Pro version and this is one of them, the programmers have to eat ;D
The major disadvantage with the task scheduler trick of using ashquick.exe is, it will scan every file of the hdd, partition, folder or file that you set it to scan; even those files not considered a potential threat, this can take a long time. It is possible to add certain folders to the exclusions list for say your media files, etc. Care should be taken with the paths you want to exclude as this could leave you vulnerable if that folder got infected as it wouldn’t be scanned by the on-demand scanner as you have excluded it. However, should you access any infected file in a Folder in the Program Settings, Exclusions, the on-access scanner (Standard Shield) should detect it provided you haven’t put the exclusions in there.
The Pro version gives a lot more flexibility and the scan would follow the settings and exclusions, etc. of the regular scan.
With the different levels of protection (Web Shield, Internet Mail, P2P and Instant Messaging) and the fall back of the Standard Shield, I find the need for daily scheduled scans lessened. I prefer to do a manual scan with my regular weekly maintenance tasks.
ok, thanks.
so from what your saying, the process scanner should be enough as base protection?
I really dont go on the net downloading all the time, as this computer is for audio production, but as everyone knows, things still manage to happen.
The on-access scanners, Web Shield, Internet Mail, Network Shield, Instant Messaging and P2P shields are all designed to keep malware out, to stop it getting established, with the Standard Shield as a last line of defence.
Now not all files are scanned by the standard shield, e.g. those not commonly infected, when you bump up the sensitivity from Normal to High then all get scanned but that could have an impact on performance depending on your system specs.
So for me a manual weekly on-demand scan, Standard sensitivity and without Archives is enough and doesn’t take that long. This does however, depend on your system spec, the volume of data on your HDD that would need to be scanned.
Generally audio files present a limited risk and that is more say an mp3 file being modified to exploit media player vulnerabilities, so it would be possible to exclude certain media files from being scanned by the on-demand scans (but not the on-access scanner).
So it entirely depends on your system, for me I still do a weekly on-demand scan.