Avast really needs an offline mode.

[red_romanov]

Avast Free keeps downloading something behind my back. 

I cannot watch Youtube videos in peace with this thing keeps hogging the already slow internet. And I already went through the settings to turn off/disable every network options including updates and community features.

[Lisandro]

Well, an antivirus needs to be on not offline...
avast! needs to be updated and the micro-updates (streaming updates) are there to protect us to new threats.
Some resources are always taken by the protection, updates, etc...

[red_romanov]

You don't get my point. I posted here because I don't know what "AvastSvc.exe" is really doing to take that MUCH bandwidth when I already turned all network options off.

I am aware of the updates, but I already changed the update to once a week because it used to trash my HDD for an update every 4 hours. Sometimes it reads/writes 700MB. My machine is from the XP age!!

Of course I want a protection, that's why I keep Avast running. But what I don't like is when I am doing something and it gets in the way. So many times my work and browsing gets so slow from time to time and I am VERY frustrated to find out it is because the Avast thing again. User should have control over this, like doing the update or whatever thing I don't even know, while the HDD/network activity is really idle, not to stop the user from what he/she is doing.

[mchain]

Hi red_romanov,

You can get the manual vps definition updates from here:  http://www.avast.com/en-us/download-update

Whilst the file itself is rather large, you simply double-click that to install the correct and latest version into your a/v, and this can be done once a day.  This would be your offline installer.

Avastsvcs.exe monitors all internet activity/connections for your protection.