Hi Guys! This is gonna be my first post in here and I hope you guys will be able to help me. ;D
I did a clean installation of Avast 6 Free AV and I setup the update frequency to 15 minutes but it doesn’t seem to update every 15 minutes, How do I fix this?
Free update check frequency limit: 120 minutes (minimum)
Pro/IS update check frequency limit: 15 minutes (minimum)
You can set it below this value but it will remain doing the minimum allowed value.
So for example if you set Free Antivirus to 30 minutes it will continue checking for updates every 120 minutes. Same goes for Pro/IS. Setting it to ie 5 minutes will result in update check to be performed every 15 minutes.
Free version is set to 4 hours (240 minutes) by default and is in general fine. If you want you can set it to 120 minutes. For Pro/IS, setting it to 60 minutes is a healthy value. Update checks are quite frequent this way, yet they don’t hammer update servers too much.
Most of other antiviruses use a hourly update check interval. Using anything below is not really helpful really unless the vendor is releasing actual updates in intervals lower than 1 hour. But as far as i know no one does that (not counting Norton’s Pulse updates).
AVIRA Free checks for updates only every 24 hours. Settings are locked to end user.
AVG Free checks for updates only every 24 hours or when connecting to internet. Settings are mostly locked to end user.
MSE checks for updates only every 24 hours or before doing a scheduled scan (which is also set to every 24 hours by default). No settings available.
avast! Free checks for updates every 4 hours and when connecting to internet. It can be set to 2 hour (120 minutes) check intervals through settings.
So even if you don’t fiddle with avast! update settings it’s still checking for new updates 6 times more frequent than any competitor product or if you set it to 120 minutes manually, 12 times more frequent. I could hardly ask for more really. If you want more frequent update checks you should check avast! pro and IS editions.
I don’t think you are actually questioning why the OP set it at 15 minutes, but in general why set it for 15 minutes (avast pro and AIS only) when the update releases aren’t every 15 minutes.
The simple answer is that by checking every 15 minutes, there would be no more than a 15 minute delay in an update being released by avast to you actually getting it. Where in the free version, there would be no more than 240 (or 120 if you had lowered the frequency) from the release of an update and it being download/installed on your system.
All of which is a much greater frequency than the other free AVs already mentioned.