Hi,
I work for a public library system in Arkansas. I was so excited to have found the Avast Free for Education program a couple of years ago as our budget keeps going down instead of up. All has been fine, but it appears that now we must, essentially downgrade to Avast for Business *Basic. For my staff machines, this has been ok; my problem lies with our public access machines.
We use a product from Horizon Datasys called Drive Vaccine. It rolls back the computer to a baseline at each restart. In the past, with Endpoint Protection, all I had to do was make sure my license was installed for Avast, then add the executable to allow for updates. With the new web based "subscription" I have tried activating the machine, then saving the baseline after it is activated. Then the next day I have to activate the machine again. Right now it only involves 4 computers, but I need to roll this out to all my public computers by the end of May when our current license expires. I cannot be reactivating 150 computers every single day, or possibly multiple times a day if our "helpful" users turn then off when they are done, or reboot.
I tried reaching out to Drive Vaccine folks, but don't think they really understood my dilemma. They suggested to set it to manual, then activate and save a new baseline and then set back to our standard at each restart. I have looked for a subscription file that perhaps I could protect, but cannot find anything. With DV, I can set up a "thawed" partition, then installing Avast there under X:\Program Files\Avast Software\Avast and it installs fine, then when I reboot it does not start with the computer. The service is not listed under services.
We are not in a position to purchase new AV software, since this was not something we had budgeted for.
Any suggestions? I thought perhaps there may be users of both on this forum.
Thanks,
Vicky