There are situations when you have to temporarily disable your antivirus software. For eg: when you are installing a new program, trying a virus removal tool, troubleshooting if something is working etc. Many people have a hard time finding out the option to disable the antivirus program. Here are some tips that will help you to disable your antivirus software

Warning:Disabling your antivirus program is like leaving the door of your house open and going for a vacation. There are hundreds of pieces of malware which are waiting for such a golden opportunity. So, remember to enable your antivirus as soon as you are done, disconnect your network if possible when the antivirus is disabled and never disable your antivirus just because your system is running slow (Many people do this).

         Your antivirus program always runs in the background. You can find all such background applications in your system tray which is in the lower right corner of your screen. So, look in the system tray and find out the icon for your antivirus program.

        If you don’t see the icon, then it may be just hidden. Click on the little arrow to expand and show the hidden icons.

       Hovering your mouse over each of them should show you the program name in a little tooltip.

        Once you have found it, double click on it to open the program. The option to disable antivirus varies according to each program. Look for any check box that says ‘Turn on autoprotect’, ‘Turn on AVG Resident Shield’, “Enable Resident Shield.”,”Disable real-time file system protection.”,“Temporarily disable Antivirus and antispyware protection.”, “Pause Protection.”, “”Disable Auto-Protect.” Etc.

        You may need to check or uncheck the checkbox depending on what it says. Once you are done, You usually get an alert from Windows security center that your antivirus is disabled. This is an indication that you have successfully turned it off .

        If you still can’t do it right, then search in Google with the name of your antivirus program. For example, search using the words ‘disable autoprotect Norton’,’ disable antivirus MacAfee’ etc. Include the full name of the product and the version number to get more specific results.

         Sometimes it happens that even though you disable your antivirus program, it might be still blocking things in your system. This is because an antivirus program also has other background services and drivers. Even though the real time protection is disabled, these services still run in the background. Well, you can stop services but you can’t mess with drivers; that is dangerous.

         But the best way to avoid these drivers and services interfering with what you are doing is to boot your computer to ‘safe mode’. If you need internet connection then you need to boot to ‘safe mode with networking’. To know how to start your system in ‘safe mode’ or ‘safe mode with networking’, refer the following page:  

                         http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial61.html

For technical tips and articles, visit  http://lockoutfixer.cz.cc

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