Mine has a virus definitions file from sometime in September of last year and it WILL NOT connect to the internet to get an update, although it runs through and gives an appearance of having connected.
In this day and age I would have EXPECTED it to figure out that I have a wireless connection and use that, it would have to ask for the SSID that is fair enough, so do O/Ss the first time around.
It won't connect with an ethernet cable either.
I see little/no need for a temp area to hold the latest definitions file (if I am ever able to GET one).
The .vpx on the regular avast seems to be around 45 Meg., very few modern machines have less than 4 Gig of RAM, surely a totally in RAm file system can't fill that up ?
Maybe a non volatile place to put a report file is desirable, but I think everything needed to connect, update and run should fit in a hundred meg or less.
It insists on a .vps file, but I can't find a way to get that - the regular avast that I run every night does not have any .vps files, just .vpx
I agree, it is essentially useless to many/most people with a suspect system that is already down, i.e. it is in no way a stand alone "rescue disk" that can cleanse off viruses and "rescue" a system from an infection - which is the expectation that most people probably have.