Thanks avast and question about how avast scans

[Tad]

Hi all,

First, I'd like to thank avast team and this forum to offer us such a great antivirus I found avast by reading user's review at CNET : http://download.com.com/3302-2239_4-10285256.html then I asked myself why people do praise this antivirus, because of it free? I bought my new Notebook two weeks ago with pre-installed Norton 2004 I'd like to try avast so I did get rid of Norton but it made me headache because Norton denied me to get rid of it so I took almost a day to completely uninstall it.

WOW !!! my new Notebook gets its full of speed as it should be, I've never know before how much Norton makes my new Notebook slow down until it's gone. I installed avast and now I know why people praise it, avast doesn't slow down my new Notebook like Norton does and I love to see a blue ball spinning around it's a sign of I'm protected by avast. I use avast in conjunction with Sygate Personal Firewall and SpywareBlaster these such a great security combination this is enough for me.

As a computer idiot like me, I have a question about how avast or other antivirus work. Just because of I save an EICAR 68 characters for test in Notepad (not save as*.com but just save as *.txt format) when it being scanned avast tells it's an EICAR test file.

This means that when *.txt, *.doc files are being scanned avast must read its content? and when *.com, *.exe files are being scanned avast and other antivirus must disassemble them to read their source code and search for a piece of code that match to a virus signature in avast's database? these is just my curiosity.

Thanks for reading my impressive experience about avast.
 

[RejZoR]

I'm glad you are happy with avast!. It's a very good antivirus indeed. About detection... its basically the same thing. If you open EICAR.COM you will see it contains the same text as the one you manually copied. So the whole thing is to detect specific pattern inside some file. It gets a bit harder for packed ones (compressed) which have to be decompressed first and then scanned.
I'm not sure if avast! disassembles anything,but then this would be a heuristic method if you want to break the file into logical units for inspection. This part can be better explaind by Alwil team since they are experts in this field.

[Lisandro]

WOW !!! my new Notebook gets its full of speed as it should be, I've never know before how much Norton makes my new Notebook slow down until it's gone. I installed avast and now I know why people praise it, avast doesn't slow down my new Notebook like Norton does and I love to see a blue ball spinning around it's a sign of I'm protected by avast. I use avast in conjunction with Sygate Personal Firewall and SpywareBlaster these such a great security combination this is enough for me.

Wellcome to the paradise  

[bob3160]

Welcome to the forums Tad.
I see you had the same problem with Norton as I did.
Norton could be called the great Devide and Concur program.
It takes your system, divides it and then concurs it. It totally brought mine to it's knees.
Since I've made the big switch to Avast!, my computer is back to being able to compute. Avast also found quite a few viruses on my computer that the great Norton never told me about.
I guess you can tell that i'm very happy that I made the switch.

[carl82]

Avast also found quite a few viruses on my computer that the great Norton never told me about.

Maybe its a way of ensuring that you would buy their new Antivirus for 2005 or sometime in the future which can claim to get rid of more viruses

Proud new user of Avast!