Hi
Somehow I do not seem to get satisfying good answers from Avast forum(I guess I got used to the extraordinary good answers I get here in this forum.... )
I`ll try my luck here:
In the web shield settings, exceptions in mime types to exclude:audio, image gif ,image/png,txt/css,video
all the above as I understand ,are there by default. Does this mean all files from this kind will not be scanned?
It is not clear why this exceptions are there to begin with, and what happens if I delete these ones ?Will it slow the system down because of the extra scanning?
3.What additional function adds the high sensitivity web shield to the normal? Does the high sensitivity slow down the computer or causes system extra load ?

Thanking you in advance
EP

I'm a new user of avast! Home Free version and quite happy with it.

I was a user of AVG Free until they insisted on my upgrade to 8.0

I tried to be a contributor to its forum but the moderators over there are a bit dictatorial.

I find that the avast! forum is quite helpful but with the range of nasties out on the Internet now it is becoming very hard to not keep a system free from infection.

I have left all of the settings in avast! at their default as I believe they know their application and what the latest threats are.


Yes.

Very true my friend! Avast is pre-configured rather well. No tinkering with it is really needed at all in my opinion.

I have not tried Avast yet. Tried all the other free AV apps. I will have to try out Avast on one of my machines. Sounds like there is a ton of settings and there is no help file available before I install to take a look at. I like to read up on things before I install so I have some idea what to expect. I hate going in blind I find that very annoying.

It would be great if one of you Avast users could provide me with the help file to look at. I know Antivir and AVG built in help files are chm files and easily removed. I would really be happy if someone could provide the Avast built in help file hint hint

I'm sure Avast is a fine program. I tried it about 6 months ago, took one look at the interface, said "Ewwww!" and uninstalled it. Sorry, the cutting-edge designs of 1994 just doesn't grab me, not even in a retro way. I don't think a serious av app should appear as a 1-inch thick blob of silver on my monitor.

Hi Corona
You have got lots of skins to choose from, I`m sure one of these will suit you, if this is your only problem regarding this product.
Eli

The media player looking default skin it has I have never liked and never will. However Avast does have the simple user interface that isn't skinned, and during installation you can even instruct it to use the simple user interface or change to it afterwards. It would be nice if they'd make a very nice standard looking Windows GUI for it though.

Well Andavary, they actually have a windows look alike interface ,see below at:

http://www.avast.com/eng/skins.html


Eli

Does it scan incoming e-mails?

Yes it does.
Eli

No, you're supposed to say,
"Yes.........yes it does."

Oh, so that's what that monstrosity is known as. Why is it the default? Who are their target audience, 12 year old Nascar and WWF fans?

I'll give Avast Ye Mateys! another shot & try a different skin. (I never knew it had skins.)

AntiVir has a nice clean UI. Now that I have disabled the annoying ad on updates I like it. Scans are super fast.

You'll have to point me to that handy dandy AntiVir pop-up removal thread. I forgot where it's located. I want to bookmark it.

Anyway, gonna install Avast Ye Swabs! now.

http://www.elitekiller.com/files/disable_antivir_nag.htm

Thanks!

Hey, when I try to download more skins it tells me "There is no application associated with the given file name". I kinda know where associations are but I've never done this before. I never had a reason to.
Anyway, Avast has many files in it. Which file do I associate? And with what? IE7? (I assume IE7, it's not listed as my default browser (duh)).

I know of those. What I was talking about was for them to make a standard GUI built into the main program that isn't a skin. They could take pointers from both AntiVir and BitDefender for making a nice standard GUI. Of course they can still support the skins for those that like them. At the moment the most user friendly skin they have is perhaps the MAC OS skin.

Avast is supposed to automatically install the skin support! You should be able to download then double click a skin and Avast will automatically install it, then immediately show what it looks like after installation.

Yeah but I've noticed lately that that kind of feature is disabled if you don't have IE set as your default browser. Of course there's no option to find out what web site the app is trying to connect to. It's buried.

There was one other skin automatically built within the downloaded app. I changed it to that. Not the greatest but better than that silver blob.

I always download skins directly into:-

"C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\DATA\Skin", and they always work fine.

Of the seven "provider modules", I usually have four running. Unless specifically needed, I disable Instant Messaging, Outlook Exchange, and P2P Shield. Apart from that, I've never changed any settings.

I've never noticed any slowdown whatsoever with Avast in comparison to other AVs I've tried, in fact just the opposite. It seems to run beautifully in tandem with Windows Firewall on my system.

Just my two penneth.

I found their skins page & downloaded a few. I think the one called Silhouette is more my style. (Similar to Avast web page design.)

I'll skip all the skin talk for now.

Dennis,
Your two penneth grabbed my attention in the above statement.
I think that is what I have been waiting to "see" or "hear" or whatever.

June 25,2008 is getting to close for us AVG 7.5 die hards.

I can't use AVG 8.0 it eats up my RAM and bogs my PC.

I think Avast will be my next adventure.

davey

Avast there mate.

I use avast! Home free on my 256MB RAM WinME, 512MB RAM XP Home and my 768MB RAM XP Pro systems and work well.

I'm another happy avast! 4.8 Home Edition user , and the only changes I made were on the...

Report file page
Selected> Create report file
Selected> Overwrite existing

Troubleshooting page
Selected> Check for full screen applications (e.g. games) before displaying pop ups

That June 25, 2008 is not official. They are are still saying Dec 31, 2008 on the official thread on the AVG forums.

I have switched to AntiVir on one of my machines and couldn't be happier. Small foot print. Uses under 10 MB of RAM. Clean and simple interface and I have had no update issues at all. Updates faster than AVG 7.5 did and less intrusive when it does update. The nag screen on updates is simple to get rid of.

The problem in AntiVir v7 was disabling the nag screen also disabled the ability to get virus information. I don't know if the same problem exists in AntiVir v8 or not, however even if it does it's better than seeing that nag screen everyday.

I will have to try that out if and when I ever get a detection to check out. There is always Google

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2282704,00.asp

I finally got hold of a help file for Avast and looked it over. From what I read there are two GUI. Simple interface and Enhanced. The Simple user Interface looks very basic. The Enhanced User Interface is only available in the paid version according to the help file. So how do you control the settings for the half dozen Shields in Avast? What if you want to turn some off or tweak them? Is it possible in the free version?

Hi Anthony
You have full control of the shield settings in the simple interface(free version) +you can turn on/off any shield. All easily configured following the help file or intuitively.
Good luck
Eli

Always been a fan of avast. They also have a rootkit detection software that is based on GMER, though it is in the beta stage.

Would be glad to change to Avast but the last time I used it on my WinXP 256MB it seemed to be terribly slow, much slower than my AVG 7.5 !

Besides it checks each and every site for every new connection I make to the internet, and on every tab it tends to slow down the connection, AVG 7.5 doesn't really slow down the internet connectivity and page downloads does it??

I had all the available options checked in Avast , dunno if that slowed it down but If any of yous have suggestions I'd much appreciate

many thanks

Windows XP on 256MB of RAM is slow regardless. Doubling the RAM to 512MB will make it feel really smooth.

I forgot to mention that I sail happily along with 512mb of ram.

One of the things you have to think about is whether or not your firewall is slowing things down. Of course this is one of those things where a definitive assessment is hard to make. My system showed some slowdown when I ran Avast with a couple of third party firewalls.

Was it the firewalls to blame? Or was it just that Avast and these firewalls didn't run very well together?

I have no idea, but by a process of trial and error, I've found that on my system, Avast and Windows Firewall just work well togther.

And may it long stay that way.

Dennis, how many processes does Avast have running and how much RAM is it using? With AntiVIr I have 3 processes running and 11MB of RAM being used. Not as good as AVG 7.5 where I have less than 2 MB of RAM being used but a lot better tha AVG 8 which uses about 75-90 MB of RAM.

I know avast and Comodo work fine together, as my friend has it on his Vista machine and it flies. Heck, my VMs where I test these things tend to zoom along.

I've got 4 modules running as listed above, and as Confucious say "a picture is worth etc":



Not the smallest footprint, but it's worked no worse for me than the other AV's I've tried including Avira. And if you look at Opera there, I'm downloading a few things right at this moment.

Avast is the ash*.* processes.

I would assume some of those Avast processes can be disabled if wanted? Are some of those the shields Avast is famous for? Even as it is there in your screen shot it's much lighter than AVG 8.

I have never seen Opera get that high in Memory use. I set the memory cache in Opera settings to 60 MB and it keeps memory use low and I notice no problems what so ever. The default setting is "automatic" and when set to that it determines how much RAM it will use based on the amount of RAM you have installed.

Actually if you want to reduce avast's memory usage further, simply go under Custom for each shield and untick what you never use.

That's what I was asking. Those shields don't have to run.

I'd still let the ones that you feel you need run. Give me a moment and I'll fire up the VM and install avast.

Edit:
Okay, I'm going to base this off my usage (if I used an anti-virus), obviously your uses will vary.

Instant Messaging - I uncheck all except gaim (which is Pidgin now). So that frees up a lot of checked items and thus you'll see some benefit.
Internet (Web based) Email - tend to leave alone, since it covers Gmail, Hotmail, etc.
Network - Good if you use a notebook or frequently connect to wireless LANs.
P2P - If I ever use anything, it was in the past and it would be uTorrent, so a lot to uncheck there. Just like IM Shield.
Standard - I leave alone
Web Shield - I leave alone

Now if I install this on a clients machine per request, I leave everything at default. But unticking programs you don't use does help.

Not being technically savvy on AntiVirus software, my criteria has simply been to disable the modules that I know for sure I don't need.

It's possible, maybe even probable, that I could trim down even more, so I'm always open to constructive advice, although with the modules I do have running, any further tinkering might not even be noticeable.

The old screen shot again:



These are what I always have running, and they are all set to "high".

Maybe I could do without the Network Shield, as I'm not on any form of home or company network, or am I misunderstanding it's function?

It's worth saying of course that Avasts module system is pretty flexible with what you need to protect and when.

If I dip my toe in the murky waters of p2p, I can activate a module designed to cover that.

Well all I have ever ran is the resident shield to give me real time protection. I have always shut off the email scanner because I use Gmail and it's scanned by them besides I am not going to open an attachment from some one I don't know and if I did and it was infected the resident shield would get it. I don't see the need for the web mail shield for the reasons I just stated. The IM shield again I see no use for. The other shields like P2P I would not need either. So If I set Avast to just have the resident shield it looks like it would be very lite.

If you're sure you're never going to need a shield you can stop/terminate it. But if you need something from it, customize it so you can lessen what it needs.

That looks like a clean interface. That's not the default one that looks like a little blob of a media player so what is it? Is that a skin or a built in option?

It's just the default screen for setting up or tinkering with the various modules. Completely seperate from the main Avast GUI.

Left click the Systray icon brings it up, right click gets the main menu.

If you do a minimal install without skinning, that's the GUI you get.

Here goes with the 3rd and last screenshot of the day, this is the gui I'm using at the moment.

Hey you have automatic updates set to off. Go stand in the corner

On client machines I set auto updates to work silently and suppress reboots.