streaming updates?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I am unclear on whether I should enable streaming updates in the settings. I don’t actually know what this is? Please explain and advise me.
I am running XP, Firefox, and dialup internet.
Thank you for the help.

2

Streaming updates are small (a few kb ) updates that are sent to your computer every few minutes. Yesterday I had 193

They are adding new definitions as viruses are analysed, this is in addition to the one or two main updates per day

You can see the updates in this folder C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\defs\14040100_stream I have a screenshot below

3

also some info here.
https://blog.avast.com/2013/09/16/seeking-perfection/

http://blog.avast.com/2013/10/15/25-years-in-the-making-avast-2014/

4

Thank you for the information.
I am wondering if streaming updates would work OK with dialup internet connection or if it would be better to just get the daily main update.
Thanks

5

VPS updates contain previous released stream updates…

6

I believe they would work when you connect to dialup, they should play catchup from your last update.

Or if a new VPS has been released you would get the VPS update with the prior streaming updates.

7

So let me see if I understand. If the VPS updates include the previous streamed updates, I would reduce the bandwidth use by not enabling the streaming of updates. Is this right?

8

It’s not like streaming updates are downloading tens and hundreds of megabytes. As you can see, every update is like 1-5KB only. That takes 1 second even on 56k modem. And you need thousand of such updates a day to even reach 1MB of size. So i wouldn’t even worry about it…

9

Thanks again. Very helpful.