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Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: hiker1 on March 22, 2012, 04:59:35 AM

Title: How to turn off avast
Post by: hiker1 on March 22, 2012, 04:59:35 AM
There are times when I want my PC (XP Home SP3) to focus on one task, such as extracting an audio CD. To do this properly I stop all unnecessary programs, including my browser, and internet connection. This means I do not need avast to run. How do I turn off avast so that it is not running at all?

Another reason I want avast off is so that it will not give me a false positive while an audio extraction is happening, as occurred today. Avast told me that Exact Audio Copy was malicious, or some other term. But I have used EAC many times. What is it that suddenly made Avast decide EAC was bad? Actually it may have been the oggvorbis plugin for EAC that upset Avast, even though I have used it before.
Title: Re: How to turn off avast
Post by: CraigB on March 22, 2012, 05:08:46 AM
To disable shield right click on the avast ball and you'll see avast shields control, as for exact audio copy which shield gave you the alert that it was malicious as you could add and exclusion for it in the correct shield.
Title: Re: How to turn off avast
Post by: hiker1 on March 22, 2012, 05:34:02 AM
Thank you for your quick reply.

Does disabling the shield(s) stop Avast from running? I want to free up as much system resources as possible to run EAC.

I tried using Task Manager to end AvastSvc.exe and AvastUI.exe, but got the messages that I was not allowed to end these programs. Pardon me, but this is my PC and I am using an admin account and I should be able to end any program that I want.

(One more item: I misread the verification code the first time I wrote this message. When I hit the back button (the only option when this happens) the message I had typed was gone. Please arrange this verification code so that if someone misreads the code, the message will not disappear! This happened a second time.)
Title: Re: How to turn off avast
Post by: CraigB on March 22, 2012, 06:45:53 AM
Disabling the shields doesn't completly shut down avast, you can shut it down completely by disabling the self defence first in settings troubleshooting then shut down services via task manager but i dont know why you would need to shut it down anyway as avast uses very little resources so it might be worth getting some extra ram installed if you find you have to shut down everthing else just so one program can run as not having avast running is really leaving you unprotected, it doesn't matter if your not connected to the net as there's numerus ways for your system to be attacked ( especially shared external drives )
Title: Re: How to turn off avast
Post by: Muad'Dib on March 23, 2012, 02:45:35 AM
hiker1,

I know your concern isn't just when using EAC, but as an example, I use EAC somewhat frequently (especially to convert my audiobook CDs to MP3 files), and have left avast! running without any problems (and when converting an audiobook, I may process 10-20 discs in a row). I probably wouldn't run a scan while I'm creating the MP3 files, but that's just because the scan can use enough resources (system & disk) to slow down EAC. If you're still concerned about avast! interfering with the extraction, I'd choose the temporary disable right-click as mentioned above (just remember to turn it back on, or disable it for an hour, and then "re-disable" it again if need be).

FYI, I'm running Windows XP Pro with 2GB of RAM, and besides avast!, I normally have at least one browser running (often two) at the same time I'm running EAC.

By the way, slightly off-topic: You mentioned that you will sometimes turn off your internet connection. Have you used EAC with an active connection? Polling the online database to see if your disc is already cataloged can be very helpful - it keeps you from having to manually label your tracks (assuming you choose a reliable entry, sometimes you may have to try a few of them), and this can save a lot of time. It also compares your converted files with the online database to see if the extraction was completely error-free. Finally, after extracting you can upload your own data to help other people extracting the same title later on (but that's up to you).