Avast WEBforum
Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: Chim on September 27, 2010, 07:33:43 PM
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As most of us already know, avast is now operating with less definitions because of that consolidation.
That said, I installed my avast 5.0 BEFORE that definitions consolidation.
Thus a certain amount of definitions, signatures, updates were installed.
And for quite a while, we were getting the full-sized daily updates.
NOW ... I'm curious.
IF I were to uninstall avast 5.0 completely with the Uninstall Utility and then reinstall avast 5.0 from scratch ... would there now be a much smaller avast 5.0 footprint in my Hard Drive since there are now less definitions?
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Short answer No, not as a result of any change with the optimisation of the virus database.
Longer answer. Since the optimised database has been here for a while now avast saves the new virus definitions in their own folder. Each of these are virtually identical and was about 53MB the last time I looked before the optimisation. On checking today they are 45.9MB so there has been a shrinkage without doing anything.
This is because of this unique folder for each different definitions folder, avast does periodic house keeping dropping off the oldest so you might have two or three of these folders, see image.
So potentially the only short term gain you might get is the loss of all your logs and the creation of the new empty or near empty logs.
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So then while we weren't looking ... behind the scenes, avast 5.0 adjusted its foot size on its own, Eh? ;D
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Well that may not have been the general intention as it was optimizing the database, but the knock on effect (due the the housekeeping) would be a smaller footprint.