Avast 5.0.418 Free
A featured added to v5 (not available in v4) is scheduling of quick or full scans. In v4 free, you could run ashquick.exe (with a drive designator) to scan a drive but it was just the quick scan. In v5 under the Scan Computer section, you can click on Settings for either the Quick or Full system scans and enable a scheduled event for each one (that is, you could have a scheduled quick scan, a scheduled full scan, or both but presumably at different times, like a full once per week and a quick on the other days). That's a nice addition but means the scheduled scan begins even if you are currently using your host.
While the scheduled scan options have several of the options available in Task Scheduler, not all are there. There is no "only start the task if the host has been idle for N minutes" option to ensure that your host has been idle that long before it runs the program. This helps prevent the program from running when you might still be using the host yourself. There is no "stop the task if the host ceases to be idle" to kill the program should you need to use it. Because the scheduled event using Avast's scheduler will run whether your host has been idle for awhile and will keep running when you decide to use your own host, the scan will significantly impact the responsiveness of your host.
There is no means to alter the priority of the process for the scheduled scan, either. That in itself would alleviate for the lack of the the "wait until idle" and "stop if no longer idle" options (which are available in Task Scheduler but not in Avast's scheduler). If the job were forced to low priority, it would lessen its impact on the responsiveness of your host when you want to use it. If you aren't around to use your host, and assuming you don't overlap your scheduled jobs (in Avast or in Task Scheduler) then a low priority job would still run as if it were a normal priority job.
There is no time at which I can schedule a scan (quick or full) within Avast's scheduler that ensures I won't be using my host at that time. Yep, my hours are so irregular that I could be using my host at any time of the day. The old trick of running "ashquick.exe c:" still works and I maybe I could use SysInternals psexec to lower its priority, as in "psexec -low <path>\ashquick.exe c:"; however, one, no GUI is presented to alert me that it is running (so I realize why there was some impact to use of my host) and, two, the process cannot be killed (Avast protects it).
In version 5, is there some other command-line method of running a scan and where I can select either a quick or full scan? If so, I could then use Task Scheduler and, at least, be able to use the "wait until idle" option. I could also load ashquick.exe using psexec to lower its priority. Alas, since the process gets protected, I doubt the "stop task if ceases to be idle" option would work since the process cannot be terminated through normal means. ashquick.exe gave me the quick scan method in version 4 but that's because that's all there was available. v5 adds scheduling for both quick and full scans but not with a command line which means I cannot alter the process' priority (to "low") and I cannot delay its start using the "wait until idle" option by defining the scheduled event in Task Scheduler instead of using Avast's scheduler.
I could go with the old ashquick.exe program to do just a quick scan and forget doing a weekly full scan. I can use psexec to run it at low priority and use Task Scheduler to delay its start until the host was idle for awhile but I get no GUI to show me that it's running (I have to look in Task Manager's Processes tab).
