Thanks for the loyalty reward but I'm leaving anyway

[REDACTED]

Hi Avast,
After 1172 days of using your free antivirus I'm about to uninstall, despite the loyalty reward. I'm just completely fed up with the popups. There are too many of them, they are big, animated, some won't disappear and it feels like most of them are only there to try and make me buy stuff.
"You have unused applications!"
"Your activity can be monitored!"
"Your system is slow!"
Go away, leave me alone and do your work in the background.

The other reason for leaving is that at times when the laptop wakes up I have to wait several minutes for the hard drive to calm down and according to Moo0 monitor Avast is one of the regular culprits.

[davexnet]

You should just install the shields and set silent/gaming mode.

No dubious "extras", no annoying messages.

[Para-Noid]

You should just install the shields and set silent/gaming mode.

No dubious "extras", no annoying messages.

If a user does as you suggest they won't get any warnings about possible infections.
No, just click the "x" and they will close.

[davexnet]

Just out of interest I downloaded the eicar file and attempted to run it.  With silent mode off, avast gives an alarm (threat
has been detected) and deletes it.  With silent mode on, there is no alarm, but the file is still deleted.  I assume this is
the way it's meant to work.

You're right "silent mode" should not be recommended without qualification.

[DavidR]

Another area of concern with silent mode is if a user enables Hardened Mode on Aggressive, you don't get the interactive window that would:
1. allow the user to add it to hardened mode exclusions.
2. possibly worse without that interactive window, you would be blissfully unaware that there was any problem. Or rather when you or a program launches a program/process, you wonder why it isn't running. This is likely to lead to confusion, why isn't it running.

[lakrsrool]

Another area of concern with silent mode is if a user enables Hardened Mode on Aggressive, you don't get the interactive window that would:
1. allow the user to add it to hardened mode exclusions.
2. possibly worse without that interactive window, you would be blissfully unaware that there was any problem. Or rather when you or a program launches a program/process, you wonder why it isn't running. This is likely to lead to confusion, why isn't it running.

Yep, that did confuse me when I was installing an upgrade that involved new components that didn't run.  I finally realized what was happening and turned "Silent mode" off to deal with the situation.  Of course the very minute I turned "Silent Mode" off I got a popup ad telling me I needed to upgrade Avast.

So I'd still much rather put up with the inconveniences (i.e. for example this specific keep this "Hardened Mode on Aggressive" issue you've mentioned) and try and keep in mind that whenever I might be running something "new" ("unknown") that "Hardened Mode" set to "Aggressive" might block that I turn "Silent mode" off during that time than to put up with these incessant ads bothering me with suggestions or advise popups from Avast telling me what I should or need to do.  It made me chuckle to see that "warning" popup the very moment I turned "Silent mode" off for just a matter of a couple of minutes realizing that without "Silent Mode" I'd surely be just another one of these long-term Avast users that we see posting in this forum with messages of "good-bye" to Avast due to the overbearing popup distractions.  It would be interesting to be privy to the Avast user attrition statistic and to know if this number happens to be increasing over time as loyal Avast users continue to be frustrated with this approach to marketing and finally out of desperation choose to go with an Avast competitor.

[lakrsrool]

Just out of interest I downloaded the eicar file and attempted to run it.  With silent mode off, avast gives an alarm (threat
has been detected) and deletes it.  With silent mode on, there is no alarm, but the file is still deleted.  I assume this is
the way it's meant to work.

You're right "silent mode" should not be recommended without qualification.

Yep, not the most desirable but still better than getting messages that repeatedly suggest to me what I need to do that I've already seen so many times before. So as I see it for the "known" threats that Avast will delete that is not transparent to me in this case then I have no problem with that as the threat would be deleted regardless and presumably that's what should occur anyway.  Other threats that might be best handled with intervention I figure will be dealt with appropriately via the "Action" settings that I've applied which is to say that along with "Hardened Mode" aggressive (which as mentioned has it's problems but can be dealt with reasonably well), I've got Shield "Actions" set to "Fix Automatically" then if this fails "Repair" then if this fails "Move to Chest" which is the most likely decision process I'd take if I was involved in any interaction so I'm figuring this is OK with me to be what occurs behind the scenes when set to "Silent Mode".