I have Pegasus on Win98SE. I have Pegasus set up to dial out, check the mail, and hang up. Since I installed Avast, sometimes Pegasus will dial out, check mail, and hang up, wait about 3 seconds, and redial.
This is very bad because my wife often checks email by clicking the button on Pegasus and walking away to do something else. Always before (with Norton Antivirus) Pegasus would be online only a minute or two, and always hang up when it was done. If this redial occurs, it never hangs up. This is bad because #1 it ties up the telephone line and #2 I pay for a limited number of hours from my ISP, and I don’t want to waste them doing nothing.
When the redial happens, there are a few Kilobytes of data exchanged in each direction, and then nothing more happens (except the connection continues). My guess is that this has to do with Avast! checking for updates. I have the “Dialup” box checked. My guess is that Avast either:
Waits a XX seconds after the connection is made before checking for the update.
The update process takes longer than checking the email (especially if the mailbox is empty)
Avast does not notice immediately when the dialup is available because it only checks periodically.
If one of my guesses is correct, then probably lengthening the delay from when Pegasus is done until the hangup occurs would correct the problem, by giving Avast time enough to finish before hanging up the phone.
Am I near the mark, or way off? I have temporarily turned off all updates, to see if it does it again.
Do you have “Always dial my default connection” checked in Internet Explorer Options (Internet Options)?
If so, select Never dial a connection and see what happens.
Update (basic), for both Virus Database and Program, ‘Ask when update is available’. So if I don’t clcik the update now it doesn’t happen.
Update (connections), I only connect to the internet using Dial-up modem.
This should ensure that you don’t want to update at that time it won’t happen.
Avast only waits for a connection to be established to check if an update is available, if one is it will inform you and ask if you want to download it now (if your settings say Ask.
If you click to download it, first a small program runs to establish, your OS, Type and Version of avast! and which elements are required to be updated. This does take a little time. Then the update is downloaded and then installed, the updates are incremental and usually small so it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.
Your problem is if there is a slow connection to the update server (for any reason), your connection is disconected during this check it will try to reconnect.
As you say lengthening the disconnect delay will help or you can continue to check for updates manually, so long as you do it frequently.
Avast with dial-up I think checks for updates each time you connect, but wilh cable/adsl, etc. there is probably a period built in.
Of the three responses so far, only David R seems to have read carefully enough to have understood the question.
Softwareguy’s recommendation to “Never dial a connection” would “break” my automatic mail fetch, where all my wife has to do is click on the “Both check and send mail” icon, and the rest is automatic. This is a non-solution.
Technical tries to tell me that " avast! does not have a ‘dialer’… It can’t dial in any way." When I know very well that Avast can trigger the windows dialler, just the same way that any other program needing access to the internet can dial. No, it does not have its own dialer, but it certainly can force Windows’ built-in dialer to dial out.
I will try David R’s suggestion to lengthen the timout on the hangup, and see if that settles things down.
Whilst avast doesn’t have a dialer, Internet Explorer by default tries to reconnect a dropped connection.
So if a program other than Pegasus (which intiated the connection) is also using that connection, has not finished when Pegasus disconnects, IE will try to restore the connection, not avast.
Another choice would be to stop the auto disconnect on completion of download of Pegasus email and disconnect manually, a pain perhaps but an option.
If it can force Windows’ built-in dialer I don’t know because I do not programme.
I can assure you, it’s not my opinion, that avast! do not dial in any way.
You won’t get connected just to update your settings, forget it. You must connect yourself or other programm will have to do it 8)
If the update do not finish or the email download do not finish, avast won’t dial again.