Kay Hangman said:
It's neither a myth nor bad advice. For instance, if you had NAV 4.0
installed on your system, and active during an install, you could often have
had it block portions of the install. If you were lucky enough to have it
set to prompt you each time, you could at least tell it to continue rather
than halt the install entirely. Imagine doing that for all the files that
need to be installed for any given program and you can see what sort of
complications may arise. Now, admittedly, the modern antivirus programs seem
to be less prone to this type of behaviour, but the advice is certainly not
a "myth".
is this your theory or anecdotal? i have only encountered an issue ONE time
and that was with an .msi script to install support tools from a microsoft
cdrom, nav popped-up a message that warned the executing script was
attempting to perform an activity consistent with virus-like behaviour.
that was a couple years ago with an older version of nav, but in all other
instances, i have not encountered a problem installing software with the AV
service running. to the contrary, on at least two occasions, the AV service
intercepted an actual virus that was attached to the executable (the
installer). imo, it makes NO sense to disable the AV service, it serves no
useful purpose to do so. in my experience, it doesn't interfere with the
installation process of software, and if it does, it will always give a
warning, in which case, the user can make an informed choice about whether
the to proceed or not. the software installation process can easily be
cancelled, disable the AV service, then restart the install. better safe
than sorry.
You also don't need to have the antivirus autoprotect feature on during
install. If you are concerned about what you are installing, manually scan
it before doing the install. If it's from a CD, scan the CD first. If it's
off the net, you should have had it scanned as it was downloaded, but you
can always scan it again before installing. Just be proactive in your
scanning practice and you won't have to worry. If you do that, you needn't
have to worry over turning off the AV scanner for the brief install
period.
we're talking about human nature here, in my experience as a systems admin,
most computer users are not 'proactive' as you put it, most just point and
click, that's why the AV protection should be running at all times in the
background to guard against the inevitable, human error. also consider, the
design of modern antivirus software is to 'set it and forget it' - let it do
the job it was intended to do, that is, on-guard at all times, since most of
us (excluding you, i suppose) don't actually know when we might encounter a
virus/worm/etc.
Again, there was good reason why this advice (turning off your AV program)
became part of most install procedures. While it may be possible that you
will encounter no issues with leaving it on at all times, if you take the
advice I mentioned above and actively scan CD/DVDs/files before you install,
you can be safe on both counts. Of course, that's just my opinion.
as stated, i've encountered only ONE issue (years ago) with an .msi
installer script from microsoft, i cancelled the install, investigated to
make sure the script itself hadn't become infected with a trojan virus.
when i was confident that it was ok, i re-launched the setup script (with
nav still running) and pressed 'OK to Proceed' button when NAV popped-up the
warning. i'm sure that issue has been resolved by now with updated virus
definitions.
i'm afraid we'll just agree to disagree on this. imo, never turn off the
antivirus protection for any reason (with the exception of a service pack
and/or digitally signed and trusted publisher), to do otherwise is folly and
inviting the inevitable (unless one happens to know for sure if/when a virus
is present, as you seem to)
