Avast + NAV, and scanning on bootup

[Stormy]

I just installed Avast, and I have Norton on my computer still - though it's out of date, I've shut off their autoprotect, and told it not to autoprotect at start-up. From what I've heard, Norton's a huge pain in the booty to completely uninstall, so...will it damage my computer to run Avast without uninstalling Norton? Or should I just suck it up and uninstall?

Also (sorry if this is a dumb Q, I'm new to Avast and couldn't find an answer in the FAQ) - is there a way I can tell it not to scan every time I boot up my computer? Or does it normally not do it unless I specifically schedule a scan? I would just test it out, but I don't want to shut down and restart my computer until I have an answer to the Norton question, in case shutting down and booting back up with Norton still on my system will make my computer Not Happy.

Thanks a ton for any help.

ETA: Haha oh ye gods!! Okay, so I nuked Norton just to be on the safe side, and LO AND BEHOLD, my computer is running a billion times faster. Turns out the "virus" I thought I had that was slowing my system to a crawl was Norton. No wonder all my virus and spyware scans were turning up bupkis.

[mauserme]

Well that was easy 

Welcome to the forum Stormy.


BTW - its not a bad idea to look for and delete any Norton remnants to avoid possible conflicts.  Look especially in the user accounts under Application Data.

[Stormy]

Thank ya much!

If I start getting conflict messages, I'll definitely go fishing for remnants, but I *think* I got everything, at least for now. I uninstalled Avast before I uninstalled Norton, then re-installed Avast so I could start out clean. I didn't get any notices about conflicts like I did the first time, which I think is a good sign. I did, however, reach the conclusion that Norton is like the Borg equivalent of software, considering the fuss it kicked up when I tried to uninstall it. Resistance is futile, and all that.

Now I just gotta see if Avast tries to scan every time I boot up. Other than that, looks like everything's in order. Rock on.

[mauserme]

Yeah - it amazes me every time I clean Norton off a computer that the owner thought they had normal performance.  From my perspective the thing was virtually unusable.

When you say avast! tries to scan at every boot do you mean a true boot scan where Windows is prevented from loading while the scan progresses?  If that's the case its not normal to happen every boot. 

But like any antivirus, avast! will scan the startup files at boot as they load into memory.  Norton did this too but didn't give you any indication of the activity.

[Lisandro]

avast! will scan the startup files at boot as they load into memory

I suggest that people try the last beta update of avast to check the improvements on boot (logon) time scanning.
Check: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=27439.0

[DavidR]

<snip>
ETA: Haha oh ye gods!! Okay, so I nuked Norton just to be on the safe side, and LO AND BEHOLD, my computer is running a billion times faster. Turns out the "virus" I thought I had that was slowing my system to a crawl was Norton. No wonder all my virus and spyware scans were turning up bupkis.

Well there are times that getting rid of NAV is harder than getting rid of a virus, so your comment is very apt.

Welcome to the avast family and the forums.