suggested settings for Avast 2015 free edition

Can anyone share their suggestions for the various settings available in the free edition? Thanks.

I’ve always found, staying with default settings in security software proves effective and efficient quite well :slight_smile:

Personally, I only install the Avast Shields…no Tools, no NG, etc…but that is in the CUSTOM INSTALL.

If you are talking “Settings” within the Avast UI once installed I would agree with schmidthouse.
However, since knowledge is power…here is another pretty smart guy’s opinion on that very subject.
http://rejzor.wordpress.com/avast-2015-protection-tweaks/

I also install only the shields without NG or any other tools.

The only change I make to the shields is in the actions section I set it to ask instead of fix automatically.

I also uncheck the voiceovers and Participate in Avast community.

I put a checkmark in Do not use Chrome as Avast default browser as I do not use Chrome.

Only the two shields, File and Web.

File has zero heuristics, which 99.9% eliminates FPs on Lotus and a couple of other legacy apps, no PUPs, no Suspicious; exclude Hosts File and all backups; transient caching only, but apart from those, look very very closely at everything!

Web has disabled HTTPS, “intelligent stream scanning” and forget about reputation. Again, no PUPs, Supicious or Heuristics; exclude Chrome and Adobe from script scanning as I don’t have those on this box. Otherwise, look very very closely at everything!

HTTPS was disabled because I need to eliminate everything that may even vaguely involve Avast! Certificates which were causing me no end of grief in browsing to secure sites that used to be trouble-free until I installed 2015.10.

So Avast! is free to concentrate on the things it does best, leaving my other security measures to worry about the internet.

Gordon.

Keep it simple…use the default settings until you get use to what avast is capable of doing.
Once you learn that, then you can tweak the settings relevant to your needs.

Thanks for the responses. I will check back later to see if anyone else had advice to offer.

I perform custom installation and installing only the file and the web shield.
Then in the settings I’m making these changes:

  • General tab

[li]enabling Scan for potentially unwanted programs (PUPs)

  • disabling Avast sounds
  • changing the duration of Update popups to 1 second
  • adding Program version to the Status monitoring
    [/li]
  • Update tab

[li]enable Automatic update under PROGRAM