Creating your own nightly full system scan; Need Help With Options Selection

[fonzo]

I'm creating a task to do a full system scan every night, and I created a new task called "daily full system scan" and under the "AREAS" section, I'm left wondering which would be the items I'd want to select to scan Floppy A:, all hard drives, and any usb flash drives plugged in to have Avast do a thorough scan which won't take forever and won't duplicate scans (like selecting local hard drives and rootkit scans and having local hard drives scan actually include a rootkit scan and thereby end up doing 2 rootkit scans being redundant and making the full scan ungodly long).
Also, under "TYPES", which options to select or not?  I mean, there is no guideline given as to the difference in relative times between "thorough but slow" and "fast". And, will "fast" find most if not all infections or is "thorough" required?  Finally, will "scan default extensions" allow many more infections to sneak past the scanner and how will that option affect the full time length of the scan?

Here are some system specs:

XP 32 with sp3
1089 Gigs of hard drive space
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+; 2705 MHz
Mamory: 4 Gigs

Processes running:
Online Armor Firewall
Memturbo
Firefox Preloader
cFosSpeed Packet Shaper

I think that should be enough relevant info.

Thanks in advance.



P.S.  Also, I'd like to know how to change the level or amount of heuristics that are used(to create false positives) in addition to just using only the Virus Definition Files.

[igor]

a thorough scan which won't take forever and won't duplicate scans (like selecting local hard drives and rootkit scans and having local hard drives scan actually include a rootkit scan and thereby end up doing 2 rootkit scans being redundant and making the full scan ungodly long).

I don't think a local hard drives scan includes a rootkit scan in Enhanced User Interface - so there is no duplication here.

Also, under "TYPES", which options to select or not?

I'd go for "content" recognition.

I mean, there is no guideline given as to the difference in relative times between "thorough but slow" and "fast". And, will "fast" find most if not all infections or is "thorough" required?

Well, nobody can say how much longer the "thorough" scan is going to run, compared to "quick" scan... as it heavily depends on the hard disk content, and also the computer itself.

Personally, I don't think it's necessary to perform the most thorough scan possible (= all files & whole files) - it might certainly be rather slow.
Also, unpacking of archives may prolong the scan time significantly... so it depends on what you really want to scan.


If you're going to run the scan every night, I'd suggest to use something "faster" - i.e. content-type recognition, probably not "all files", certainly not "whole files"; regarding the packers, you might stick just to the default ones - Exec, WinExec, NTFS Streams (and in the upcoming new avast! version, also "Droppers").

[Lisandro]

in the upcoming new avast! version, also "Droppers"

Yeah... version 4 update is coming