virus scanning

Should you Follow links for virus scan?

Should heuristics sensitivity be Low or High?

Use Code emulation?

It is best to leave the scans at their default settings until you are more familiar with avast. They provide the best balance between protection and performance.

With a resident on-access antivirus like avast, the need for frequent on-demand scans is much depreciated. For the most part the on-demand scan is going to be scanning files that would be otherwise be dormant or inert. If they were active files then the on-access file system shield would be scanning them before being created, modified, opened or executed.

I have avast set to do a scheduled weekly Quick scan, set at a time and day that I know the computer will be on. If for some reason my system wasn’t on, no big deal I will catch up on the next scheduled scan.