Turn off scanning

On Avast Free, can I turn off routine scanning of hard drives for a time but leave real-time protection working?

can I turn off routine scanning of hard drives for a time
Do you mean sheduled scanning ?......if so yes

And where do I find the ‘kill switch’?

the same place you created the sceduled scan i guess…think it is here more details/ settings/ scheduling

Do you have a scheduled scan? Look at the GUI → Scan Computer → Quick Scan → Settings → Schedule

DJBone

Sorry, I was under the impression that the AV rumages through the HDD looking for suspects. Otherwise how has it alerted me to an incident in my secondary HDD drive. How did it find something dormant if it didn’t scan (factory settings)? I certainly haven’t scheduled any scanning.

Could have been something else (MS Windows indexing service?) touching the files, thus triggering the on-access scan.

Otherwise how has it alerted me to an incident in my secondary HDD drive.
did you open the folder where that file is...or try running it ?

the file shield is watching all file movments in real time so if you or the machine is trying to run a infected file it will detect…

can you post the alert you got…

Maybe. Gotcha. Avast doesn’t have factory set regular scans preset. No scanning takes place without my permission. Its just a watchdog on high alert. That’s good to know. And a nice AV too.