Want to download Avast! Home, but have a few questions:-
Being in England do I select US or Czech as being the nearest?
When starting to download (selected Save to Disk) it didn’t give a proper default path, but just ‘photos’ (the last folder I had been in) … is this correct? Where should it be saved? or should I select ‘open’ instead of save to disk?
OS is Windows XP
Any help/advice would be appreciated … new to all this!
Like Vlk said, you can save it anywhere, but, in the photos folder isn’t a good place since the program isn’t photos. You can navigate to the C drive by clicking several times on the folder icon at the top of the save box.
It will be easier to find, if you need to at some later date, if saved to the C drive … or whatever your main hard drive is lettered.
I learned and acquired a useful habit for downloads over the years. If you’re offered a number of “mirror” sites to download from (and this assumes you know more or less where they are), I try to pick one that’s overseas, especially if it’s the wee hours of the morning “over there”.
All other things being equal, a server will usually be busiest during the day and evening at its local time. So if you try at a quiet time there, the download will usually go faster and smoother.
That can backfire occasionally, of course – a good server operator will try to schedule routine (as opposed to emergency) server maintenance during those quiet hours, to minimize disruption, so the site might be temporarily down, but give it a try anyway.
The avast download links are in fact load-balanced - i.e. they’re “smart” in the sense that if you click it, a proper download server is chosen for you - based on current load situation and our bandwidth optimization requirements.
You can test this by clicking a link multiple times - you’ll most likely get the file from a different server every time you try…
That’s one of the pillars of the infrastructure behind an AV company - a remarkable network of download/update servers to enable smooth updating for all users (both regular and emergency).