Avast Home Edition Video

Avast Home Edition Video Transcript

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>> Hi, I'm Peter Butler from CNETDownload.com and today I'm taking a first look at Avast Home Edition. Avast may look like a music player, but it's actually one of Download.com users favorite antivirus applications. Avast is the second most popular free antiviral application on Download.com. And its currently one of the top ten most downloaded programs on the site. During installation you can chose the standard installation or the minimal installation, which simply leaves out two megabytes worth of skins or you can opt for a custom installation, which lets you mix and match the elements that you want to include with Avast. You'll need to restart Windows to complete the Avast installation and you can opt to automatically schedule an Avast scan upon boot up. Each time it starts, Avast performs a quick scan of your system memory and start up items, which is a nice touch. After the memory check, a quick start guide for Avast breaks down the five basic steps of antivirus protection, with links to supporting info. Selecting the check box at the bottom ensures that you won't see that welcome screen again. Now don't be confused when you see the main interface with a play and stop buttons and an eject button, it looks a lot like a music player. But it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on once you look at the main screen and the main buttons. The main screen in Avast displays your basic system information such as the date of your last virus scan and the current version of the Avast virus database. The basic actions of Avast are divided into six buttons in two columns on each side of the main screen. On the left side, from top to bottom are the virus chest where dangerous and suspicious files can be quarantined. The resident scanner which can be set to standard, high or disabled and the IAVS lighting bolt which checks for antivirus database updates. The three buttons on the right side of the interface are used to specify what areas of your computer will be scanned. The first button, local disks, determines whether or not your hard drive will be scanned at all. A pop up window will let you specify a quick scan, standard scan or a thorough scan and it also lets you decide if archive files will be included. The second button that looks like a CD allows you to scan removable media such as floppy disks, CDs and DVDs. The last button, the folder image, lets you specify the exact system folders that you want Avast to scan. Those six buttons provide most of the main functionality of Avast. But if you want to see the full menu of options, click on the eject button in the top left corner of the interface. When you're ready to scan, just hit the play button and Avast will do the rest. After it presents the results of the scan, you can decide what you want to do with each offending item if there are any. This has been Peter Butler with a first look at Avast Home Edition. Thanks for watching. ^M00:02:34 [ Music ]