So I DLed AVG free recently and it's nice and effective and simple. Maybe it's right in front of my nose but for the life of me I can't seem to find the very general options. You know, where I stop it scanning booting up when I'm installing a driver and it auto-scans sometimes out of nowhere..can't seem to find where to change that either. What am I missing here?

Have you wandered around the AVG control center area? That's where much of this stuff can be set up...

Yes. There is only program settings which does nada really. There are options when you right-click on each particular program but they don't really do the trick either..most are customizations.

Hmmm... just took a quick look around, and it's not overly intuitive. However, properties for AVG Resident Shield may get you closer.

As for scan at boot-up, that's going to be in your start menu (startup programs). Autoscanning out of nowhere... that's probably from a scheduled task.

Wish I had better answers.

May I ask where on the site you have to go to download it? I went there yesterday and couldn't find the free version for love nor money!

Ok found the scheduler. I agree it's not intuitive really. I expected the scheduled tasks to be linked into the control centre. Disabled it anyways, there were 2 default tasks scheduled.

The properties for the shield I had known about but I was looking for a simple 'disable avg shield' for times when I'm installing drivers, games etc. There apparently is no such option so what I have to do is disable every service the shield runs and then re-enable them when I'm done *groan*.

Shamrock, I got mine at www.majorgeeks.com/download886.html.
It's a good prog just not amazingly user-friendly for my own personal methods but it picked up viruses and worms other progs never found, that's what I liked.

Thanks for the help Bungleau!

www.grisoft.com is the official site. here is a list of the downloads.

I've been using AVG for 2 or 3 years now, and it's not bad. Only thing is it occassionaly (and very rarely, but happened today actually)disables the resident shield, and the only way I've found to enable it again is to restart my PC. I've tried various other methods.

You can always try Avast http://www.majorgeeks.com/Avast_Home_Edition_d1968.html

You can stop on-access protection by right clicking on the avast icon in the system tray.

Much obliged everyone [img]smile.gif[/img]