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Wow, I never understand people who want to cripple their AV service to the point where the AV can not do it's job of complete protection. Using manual update leaves your computer much less protected in between those infrequent manual updates. Suppose you update manually each week, or for that matter, even daily. During that time between manual updates, your computer could easily become infected by new malware. Then, you will be blaming Avast for not protecting your computer. On the other hand, had you had automatic updating, which most often happens multiple times a day at various times adding new malware detections, your computer would most likely have been protected and would not have become infected.
And as Vlk also pointed out, file reputation is very much needed to protect your computer when surfing the web from site to site. And do not tell us you only visit safe sites. Because of today's malware, there is no such thing as a completely safe web site. Those so called 'safe web sites' are easily injected with malware that can not be seen when you visit the sites. You do not even have to click on anything on that web site you thought was safe. All you have to do is visit the web page and you are infected when you have crippled your AV.
Sure, go ahead and disable all those services that "contact the mother-ship(s)" and let us see how long you last.
Something to keep in mind -
When on-line, if you can not trust your AV service, then you can not trust anyone on-line ... nor should you be on-line at anytime.
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