How to turn off Avast antivirus

Some software requires you to disable your antivirus during installation. Here are 2 ways to practice that for both the free and paid versions of Avast.

Similar all total antivirus suites with real-fourth dimension scanning, both the gratis and paid-for editions of Avast take over from Windows Defender in protecting your PC and monitoring for malware.

Sometimes you’ll want to disable it entirely for a few minutes to follow the installation requirements of another piece of legitimate software that needs to modify your registry, Windows services, or other tasks that may trigger behavioural threat detection in your antivirus.

You may also wish to practice this so y’all can run software that you know to be rubber, merely which Avast might course as potentially unwanted and quarantine. Withal, I
strongly
advise against disabling your antivirus to run a potentially unwanted program unless yous’re a programmer or a software professional person working with trusted – or at least known – material, ideally on an air-gapped organization

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What we used

Any Windows x or 11 computer with Avast installed

The Short version

Open Avast’s correct-click notification area bill of fare
Select how long you want to disable shields for
Confirm that yous wish to disable all shields
Re-enable Avast’due south shields

Step

1

Click on the ^ arrow in Windows’ notification surface area at the lesser right of the screen, then correct-click on Avast’s icon to open up a carte du jour. From hither, click on Avast shields command.
Step

ii

Select how long yous want to disable shields for

A sub-menu volition ask if y’all wish to disable shields for 10 minutes, an 60 minutes, until the next reboot, or permanently (until y’all manually re-enable them). I recommend avoiding the last one, as it’s easy to forget that you’ve disabled your AV.
Stride

iii

Confirm that you wish to disable all shields

A pop-upward will announced asking if you want to do this. Click the OK, End button. Windows pop-ups merely above the notification area will invite you to turn on virus protection, equally you lot currently don’t have any.
Step

4

Re-enable Avast’south shields

When y’all’ve finished the operation that required you to shut down Avast’southward malware defenses, re-open Avast’due south notification area right-click card, go to Avast shields control and click Enable all shields.

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Troubleshooting

Are there whatsoever other means to practise this?

You can likewise disable Avast’due south shields through the main Avast client’southward Settings bill of fare and, on a more granular basis, via the Core Shields options in its Protection tab.

Why would I need to disable this software?

On Windows 10 and Windows 11, it’s rare to encounter software that really does need you to disable your antivirus, so unless there’s very specific reasoning as to why this is necessary, or a peculiarly dire alarm, I would first attempt installation without disabling your AV.