New user - compatibility questions

I am ecstatic to be a new user of Avast AV! I had spent the last month trying to get McAfee VirusScan to work following its recent disastrous update, which has left it (still to this date) essentially incompatible with the W98 OS. Finally, in disgust, I uninstalled McAfee VirusScan AND Spamkiller - which is another story of a different ruinous update (just read the McAfee forums) - leaving only its Firewall, which hasn’t caused problems YET. I then downloaded/installed Avast Home Edition and, after a quick WinRescue98 registry repair, have now seen my old Gateway 400 MHz, Pentium II desktop speed along without a hitch, faster than it has in ages! What a relief!

I don’t think I could bear another round of crashes and endless troubleshooting for any reason, so I’d like to check a couple of things out right away before I make any mistakes:

I have TrojanHunter 4 installed but not running; I have tended not to use its background scanner, TrojanGuard, because I found it seriously conflicted (i.e., immediate freezes and crashes, within moments of booting it up) with McAfee AV. But now, running Avast AV, I tried its LiveUpdate function and then also booted up its main screen, all without a hitch or - so far - any apparent problem. IS it safe or advisable to run TrojanHunter 4 while also running Avast AV? It would be ideal if I could, giving me a second full-time layer of protection… If not, exactly what steps would I take to temporarily disable whichever Avast functions might conflict before booting up TrojanHunter and doing an occasional system scan with it?

One other question is about the Avast WebScanner. It seems to drain too much of my system’s resources, leading to one very unwelcome crash yesterday after I had tried it for a few minutes. Even though I have a pretty fast DSL, I immediately noticed very long delays in loading webpages, and then the computer crashed (which happened when I tried to use some other application while surfing).

Is my meager 400 MHz processor speed, running W98, potentially insufficient to run WebScanner (which I then disabled, also returning my POP3 email account to a non-proxy setting, and since then, everything’s been running perfectly)? If necessary, I can certainly live without it - I have until now, using ^$%#* McAfee. (Using mainly just the Avast resident scanner and email scanner, both breezing along without causing a single crash, is plenty good enough for me.) But I’d like to know if you think there might be anything more going on, perhaps a wrong setting somewhere to account for the WebScanner issue, above and beyond my creaky old system.

Thanks for your help, and thanks for providing a great product!

Welcome 8)

As far I know, no problems running both of them together. You can search the board a little anyway…

To manually configure your browser see the following tutorials:
For IE and permanent connection users: http://www.avast.com/files/tutorials/ws_ieproxy.htm
For IE and dial-up users: http://www.avast.com/files/tutorials/ws_ieproxy_dialup.htm
For Firefox users: http://www.avast.com/files/tutorials/ws_ffproxy.htm
Web Shield is a new provider. It is a proxy that filters the communication of a web browser, looking for viruses. It also makes it possible to block certain files by URL or MIME type. HTTP Scanner should deal with all network traffic such as spywares, adwares, toolbars, BHOs, hijackers and other malicious scripts. It will work as a real time network-based antivirus firewall, it will filter HTTP (web) traffic before it reaches the browser.

Why? Don’t you want to scan your emails?!? ::slight_smile:
Read: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?action=display;board=2;threadid=7913;start=0#msg64228

Thanks a lot for the immediate response. I must have been too tired to think straight when I wrote my first post, because of course I want to scan my emails and have been doing so. I meant to say that I had, at the time, disabled WebScanner and returned my IE6 setting to non-proxy. I’ve been running everything except WebScanner successfully since installation. However, since posting, I managed to troubleshoot the WebScanner issue myself: It occurred to me that it might conflict with Earthlink TotalAccess’ embedded ScamBlocker, and my hunch proved true when I tested them together. So I disabled the ScamBlocker, re-enabled Avast WebScanner and it’s been working beautifully since then.

Good to know I can use TrojanHunter’s background scanner as well. You’ve been a great help.

My pleasure on helping…
If you can, come back to help other users and help to keep the fellowship of avast 8)

To manually configure your browser see the following tutorials: For IE and permanent connection users: http://www.avast.com/files/tutorials/ws_ieproxy.htm For IE and dial-up users: http://www.avast.com/files/tutorials/ws_ieproxy_dialup.htm For Firefox users: http://www.avast.com/files/tutorials/ws_ffproxy.htm Web Shield is a new provider. It is a proxy that filters the communication of a web browser, looking for viruses. It also makes it possible to block certain files by URL or MIME type. HTTP Scanner should deal with all network traffic such as spywares, adwares, toolbars, BHOs, hijackers and other malicious scripts. It will work as a real time network-based antivirus firewall, it will filter HTTP (web) traffic before it reaches the browser.

Question: Why do we need to configure our browser settings? ???

Web Shield works like a local proxy filter. The communication of a web browser (HTTP traffic) is scanned transparently in Windows XP but with Windows 98 the user should configure the browse settings.

Oh I see :o

One last question about compatibility: If I were having virus problems and at some point wanted to run an additional antivirus scan, one of the online AV’s like Panda’s ActiveScan or Trend Micro’s Housecall, would I need to temporarily disable the Avert Web Shield and Standard Shield - or for that matter the whole program - to do it?

Thanks…

Don’t use Pand’s on-line Acitvescan, these forums are littered with the debris of false positive alerts caused by panda not encrypting its virus signsture files that it downloads.

Yes it is advisable (to avoid possible conflict) pause standard shield, connect to whatever on-line scanner you choose, and pause just before you are going to do the scan and resume on completion. I think that it would be ok to keep web shield active as that is not monitoring your HDD.

Check out RejZoR’s Website - Security Ops
On-line Virus Scanners and other useful Links Security.Ops.tk

OK–since I saw this thread, I hvae been having some problems myself…also, being new to the avast family, I hvae read MANY threads regarding the “unable to send/recieve email” issues, and have been unable to fix the problem.
Been to countless links on the subject and, well, possibly, I’m too much of a newb to grasp the situation
My PC is a p3, with IE AND Firefox enabled–dont know why–and I have dld the avast 4.6.603–as of three days ago, everything was working just great–now I can no longer send/recieve emails OR update the avast program. The message I get from the avaast is that “Can’t select any server for downloading (from 1)”–I have no idea what this means…
I KNOW this is probably a repeat thread/question, and if there is any pertinent info missing, I will gladly supply it, but I REALLY like the job the avast does for the PC, and would like to get it back up and running.
So ANY help would be greatly appreciated…
Thanks in advance…

Thought I would add that I just uninstalled/reinstalled/rebooted, and with a newer version even–4.6.652–and i STILL am encountering the same problem…

The 3 most important bits of information to help us in our quest to help you are:
What OS are you using, what email program are you using (does it use SSL) and what firewall are you using?

Also, what have you tried that hasn’t worked?
This should stop us re-inventing the wheel.

Guess I’ll add those to my sig at the bottom–thought I had included them, but I guess not

FYI–XP home edition with SP2
Outlook express
Windows firewall–I think–nope–positive

  1. I would suggest you get one of the freeware firewalls (discussed many times in the forums) as XP’s firewall only provides inbound protection, so there is nothing to stop outbound conections, downloading malware or sending your personal/banking details.

  2. Pause or Stop the Internet Mail provider and try to send a test email to yourself. - does it work?

You are also involved in another thread on this same topic, this causes confusion and duplication of effort.

Continue this in the other thread and abandon this one as it is not really a compatibility issue (off topic for this thread)