On April 9, 2004 jedisb set forth a great set of instructions on how to set Avast Home Edition to do a scan at a time when one is not working on the computer. I plan to try this, but have a couple of questions: If my laptop is in the standby, or, hibernate mode, will Win XP ‘wake up’ my computer so the scan can start? Or, should I just disable standby, hibernate and the screen saver first, and leave the computer to run all night? I’m thinking about doing the scan at, say, 3am in the morning. But I’m not keen on the idea of the hard drive just sitting there, spinning, all the time the scan is not going on. Comments and suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks…Jim
I’m curious, won’t you just use avast! screensaver, cause that scans your computer when your not working on the computer. Are you saying that they invented a instructions to make avast! scan when you turn off the computer or something?
It depends on what you configure into Windows Taks Scheduler options. If you check to ‘awake’ the computer, it should work.
In fact, running at night will be the better and as far I could imagine, the computer won’t hibernate or standby in this situation…
With avast’s multi level defence in depth of the resident on-access scanners Web Shield, backed up by Standard Shield, Internet Mail Backed up by Standard Shield you are pretty secure.
I tend to do a scan of my local drives once a week as a part of my regular system maintenance tasks, so I don’t schedule scans, in fact I have the Task Scheduler Service disabled in XP. That way you don’t have to worry abpout the hibernation/standby issue with your laptop. You also can’t effectively schedule a scan with the free home version, yes there is a work around with ashQuick.exe.
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 when compared to the on-demand scan where you can set sensitivity, files to scan, etc.