Solo Technology

[Ok, worst title ever]

When I first reloaded my home machine a few months back, I installed McAfee antivirus. That didn’t last too long before it distressed me too much and I went into the arms of my old pal, AVG Pro. Grisoft ’s AVG seems to have been doing the job, but today I decided I should give Avast Antivirus a shot and see what all the buzz is about. Like AVG, Avast offers a free home version, so it is a cheap enough experiment.

Why change? No concrete reason, really. Although the AVG has some detractors, I really haven’t read anything that alarmed me too much. But Avast just seems to be generating more noise lately so… what the heck.

The installation is pretty straightforward — not much to worry about. Had to reboot when done, of course. *sigh* Once I was logged back in I was pondering this toolbar icon that was spinning, wondering what it was doing — and suddenly it started talking to me. Gee, I’ve never had antivirus software that wanted to talk to me before. I dig it.

It looks like the default config is to check for updates every 4 hours. While I don’t see where that can be changed (yet), not sure why I’d want to. By default you get a bunch of “providers” (also referred to as “special modules”). Still not sure if I really need all these and - in some cases - not sure why I want ‘em. But, overall memory usage is fine. In fact, a few MB less than AVG’s.

Providers:

1. Instant Messaging - as near as I can tell, it just watches for file transfers over IM clients. It knows about many of them including Gaim.
2. Internet Mail -and-
3. Outlook/Exchange - Yep, 2 different email “providers”. Haven’t really figured out what the difference is here. But in poking around the Internet Mail guy, I see he knows about NNTP as well as Pop3, IMAP and SMTP. Interesting. There are some powerful options buried in these two.
4. Network Shield - No clue. And according to this guy’s “Last scanned” ticker, it hasn’t done anything yet.
5. P2P shield - Lists out a bunch of P2P clients and will scan files received from them. With “normal” active scanning turned on, I’m not sure why I’d need this (assuming I used a P2P client). Turning this guy off.
6. Standard Shield - The appears to be the good ol’ real time scanner. Leg up on McAfee — it lets you exclude directories or files.
7. Web Shield - Not sure what this guy is doing that “standard shield” won’t pick up. I’ll leave it on for now and see if it impacts web browsing at all.

[edit: found more info about these thingies lower on the product page]

What’s missing? Well, I haven’t found an option to schedule a weekly scan. Maybe it is in there somewhere… or maybe not. Still poking around.

I run a full scan on my system not long after the install. It was very unhappy with my “tools” directory. lol. And it talks when it finds stuff. Nifty at first, but it gets old. Now, those tools are arguably false positives McAfee found a couple and AVG never mentioned ‘em at all. Avast found a dozen. Not a real useful metric, but thought I’d mention it. The full scan took longer than either of the other two did, but I did set it to the “thorough” level which was not the default. I suspect that added time.

There you have it, that’s all I know. So far.

One Response to “Avast there, you lubbers!”

1. Rich G. on January 14th, 2006 10:05 pm
   

   Big fan of AVG, been using it for ages and have the talk to me feature disabled. Voices I don’t expect startle me. Especially when I’m working in a hotel room alone on the laptop hehehe.

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