No Notify Avira has been designed by the developer to provide inexperienced computer users with an option to disable the Avira Antivir popup ad effectively. The program supports AntiVir Free 8, AntiVir Free 9 and the latest Antivir 10.

The program displays a command line prompt giving the user the choice to remove the advertising in Avira Antivir 8, 9 or 10 which can be selected by pressing the keys 1 to 3 on the computer keyboard.

No Notify Avira will then make changes to the Windows Registry to disable the advertisement in the selected Anvira Antivir application.

The software program is fully portable and compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. Some operating systems might require to run the program as administrators to make the changes to the Registry.

The latest version of Avira Antivir identifies the program as a virus which is a false positive. Cautious users can check the software at Virus Total.

No Notify Avira is available at the developer’s website. (via Webtrickz)

Antivir 10 Free, often also called Antivir 10 Personal, includes the antivirus, anti-malware, anti-spyware and anti-rootkit modules but lacks features like anti-spam, backup or a firewall which are only available in Antivir 10 Premium or the Avira Security Suite.

The installation of the antivirus software is straightforward. It takes only a few clicks to install the program. A custom installation option is provided to block the installation of some components, specifically the Antivir Guard, AntiVir rootkit detection and the shell extension. Blocking the first two only makes sense if another security software protects the computer system from those threats.

Avira Antivir 10 displays a configuration wizard on first start. Inexperienced users might be best of to leave everything at the default settings while advanced users can configure the detection level of the AHeaD heuristics module, the types of threats that Avira Antivir Personal should detect (adware, dialers, games, fraudulent software, backdoor clients and more) and the startup type of the software.

Avira 10 still displays advertisement popups to the user (take a look at How to disable the ad popup in AntiVir to disable the popup).

The program will perform a quick scan after installation that checks the most important file locations and processes. It is recommended to perform a complete system scan afterwards.

The interface has been redesigned and all available options can be reached with just a few clicks. Avira AntiVir Personal displays three menus on the left sidebar, an overview that displays the current protection status, events and reports, local protection that can be used to perform scans or administration that provides access to the quarantine and scheduler.

All of the options are also accessible from the top menu. It is to early to judge the effectiveness of the program but initial tests by AV-Tests “detected an excellent 98.6% of malware and achieved a “high level” of rootkit detection”.

Avira Antivir 10 now supports cloud based detection of threats, a concept that is becoming increasingly popular with security software developers. The antivirus software introduces a generic repair feature “for damage that may be caused by new variants of viruses and malware”.

Avira Antivir Personal can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It has a size of 40 Megabytes and compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

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.

Avira made an announcement a few days ago where they addressed that problem somewhat. They mention that they have realized that “users of the free Avira AntiVir Personal had issues fetching the Updates in time recently”. This is not exactly the same issue but it could very well be related.

Avira therefor decided to implement the following two changes: Change the virus definition file format and use a content distribution network.

First, we switch from our current virus definition files (called iVDF) to a new format called nVDF. iVDF consists of 4 VDF files, while nVDF uses at least 32 files – we need to transfer less data for updating our virus definitions effectively in the future.

This means that we need to deliver about 25 MByte to every Avira installation starting today for switching to the new update system. This might lead to some delays for some users, especially for the users of our free version Avira AntiVir Personal. Just to get an idea about what we’re talking here: More than 100.000.000 Users are trying to get the update more or less on the same day. That is more than 2.5 Petabytes (or 2,500 Terabytes) of traffic.

The previous format used four files that contained all the virus definitions of the program. The new format splits those virus definitions in at least eight times that number so that it will take less data transfers to update the virus definition files (it theoretically could slow down as well if a majority of the files need to be updated as this would mean that more files need to be transferred than in the old update system, but that’s just speculation as there are no technical information available about the process at this point).

To ease the bandwidth bottleneck, we decided to additionally use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). We were first testing a CDN built up by our current Internet service provider. Shortly after activating the CDN, the redirectors – which redirect the update requests to servers close to the users location – were overloaded and couldn’t answer the requests anymore. The situation was solved a little later on, but the CDN isn’t big enough yet to spread this huge update in time. So we decided to switch to a global player in the CDN market to deliver the update.

The second change is the use of a content delivery network. Avira is building up their own CDN but had to contract a global CDN company to spread the massive update to all Avira users. It is likely that they intend to switch to their own CDN at a later time.

It does sound like a good plan though although the massive data transfer to bring the update to all Avira users could prove to be quite a challenge. Did anyone already receive the update?

Luckily though Ghacks reader Dante found a solution for the problem which he send in as a tip to share here at the website. The Avira update problem seems to only affect the automatic update of the antivirus software. What is not affected at all is the manual update process.

To fix Avira Antivir Update problems a user would therefor need to aquire a new virus definition file and update the software manually with it. This fixes the broken automatic update in Avira Antivir:

• Download the latest antivirus definition file for Avira Antivir at Softpedia.
• Bring up the Avira Antivir interface.
• Select Update and there Manual Update
• Use the file browser to select the downloaded updated definition file
• Wait until the update has finished.

The manual update of the antivirus software will fix the broken automatic update in Avira so that it can be used again afterwards. Thanks go to Dante for sending in the tip.