Avira Antivir is a popular free antivirus software that is installed on millions of computer systems. Computer users who have installed it do however encounter two annoyances that are linked to updates that are usually performed on a daily basis. Avira will display a large popup on every update that usually advertises the commercial version of the antivirus software. While this behavior would be more than ok every once in a while it gets really annoying if it is experienced by the user day in day out (especially since the popup does not seem to change often).
The antivir popup has to be clicked away separately each time as well as it does not automatically close itself when the user closes the update window after the update was successfully transferred to the computer system.
Avnotify.exe is the program responsible for the popup windows during updates. The easiest way to block the Avira Antivir popup windows is by changing the security permissions of that file. This can be done by right-clicking avnotify.exe in the Avira home directory (usually c:\program files\avira\), switching to the Security tab. That tab might look different depending on the operating system used. An edit button should be there which should open a new window to edit the file permissions for all known users of the computer system.
Locate the Read & Execute permission and set it to Deny instead of Allow. This can be repeated for all users that are using the computer system so that none will see the Avira Antivir popup during updates.
The second annoyance is that the scheduled update window breaks fullscreen applications as it is started in minimized state. This can be problematic while playing games or using other fullscreen applications that should not be interrupted by the update.
This can be changed in the scheduler of Avira Antivir Personal where it is possible to change the display mode from minimized to invisible to prevent this from happening in the future.
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It should be noted that avnotify.exe is also responsible for displaying more information about a virus when encountered meaning that you won’t be able to tap Avira’s information database via the application.
It doesn’t affect how the program operates though
I switched to Avast because of such problems with AntiVir, but it is worth noting that in objective tests, it is one of the top-performing antivirus apps around, doing better than some–many, actually–paid utilities.
I tried disabling this once and got problems getting automatic product updates. Now I leave it alone. I figure: eh, it’s free. It’s an annoyance I can put up with. And on http://www.av-comparatives.org/ this rates as number 1 in detection. Number one in false positives too, but it detects everything. Just gotta search the web thereafter to see if the detected is a false positive or not.
Why not just use Microsoft Security Essentials?
Assuming that that is not a rhetorical query, Arthur, I for one don’t trust MS, & make a point to use as little of its stuff as possible, apart from the OS.
thanks a lots, I was very stressed with this popup, but this is over now, thanks!!
If you don’t want to use Avira, just use free aVast or AVG.