Scheduling scans with Avast is easy, as it turns out, if non-obvious. Launch Avast, then, non-intuitively, click Scan Now. Click Settings, then, buried on the left is an option called Scheduling.
I recommend doing a quick scan at least once a day and a full scan at least once a week. If you’re using Avast as a secondary scanner, be sure to have your primary scanner scheduled to perform scans too.
I was explaining this to someone this week, and he said, “Wait. You wrote a book about performance, and you’re saying run two antivirus engines?” Yes. There’s minimal, if any, performance penalty to having Avast as a second one, and you get better security. Get an SSD, and you can scan multiple times a day and probably not notice.
Scanning at least once a day with two different engines protects you if one scanner finds out about a threat before the other does. When you can’t get perfect defense, you layer it to at least get something better.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.