The importance of anti-virus software is known to everyone. Avast anti-virus is a renowned brand that provides us with quality antivirus software that gives us the necessary options to protect our system from viruses and malware.
However, in certain situations, we may need to disable our Avast ant-virus. For example – your anti-virus may prevent you from installing certain software or block some websites as a security feature. Or you may want another anti-virus but two anti-viruses can’t work at the same time leads to problems. In order to avoid these, we need to disable or remove the anti-virus. Removing the anti-virus makes our system prone to all suspicious software and threats on the internet and can be damaging to the system.
Therefore, we should go for the other option, which is to disable some of the shields of Avast antivirus or all of them temporarily or for a short period of time.
You may either want to turn off all the shields or some of them as per your need.
How to Turn-off Avast Antivirus?
If you want to turn off all the shields of Avast anti-virus, you have to go through the following steps-
1) Go to the bottom right-hand-side and click on ^ (Show hidden icons)
2) Right-click on the Avast logo and select the option“Avast Shields Control”
3) Now, choose from multiple options like :
- disable for 10 minutes
- disable for 1 hour
- until the computer restarts
- disable permanently
Remember ‘permanently’ will disable all the shields of anti-virus.
4) A confirmation dialog box will pop up, click on OK, STOP
The above steps work with both Avast free and paid antivirus.
To be perfectly sure that the shields have been turned off and Avast antivirus is disabled completely, go to the main dashboard of the antivirus. The status icon will be visible in red color and it will show a message “All shields are off”. This means you have successfully disabled your Avast anti-virus software.
How to partially disable Avast Antivirus?
In case, turning off some of the shields will suffice, you can follow the below steps to partially disable the antivirus protection-
1) Open the Avast Antivirus and choose “Protection” from the options you see on the left.
2) Now select “Core shields” to view all the active shields.
3) From core shields, select individual shields that you want to disable like:
- File
- Shield
- Mail Shield
- Behavior Shield, etc.
4) Use the switchers just below the corresponding icons of the shields to turn them off.
There are 4 options for you to choose from- to stop for 10 minutes or 1 hour, until computer restarts or permanently.
For Older Version
If you are using an older version of Avast, the same thing can be done by going to “settings” and the “active protection” option.
Once you select “active protection”, you will see various active shields. You can select the ones you need to turn off.
Now, go back to the main window. Since you have turned off some of the shields, the status icon will appear yellow. Also, a message will appear stating that the particular shield is off.
You can enable the shield from here again, whenever you want.
In case, none of the above works for you, you can also choose to uninstall the anti-virus. However, that is not suggested as your system will become vulnerable in the absence of an anti-virus. Nevertheless, if you really want to uninstall it, you may follow some steps and accomplish the task without hassles.
