Hi GuysI am just about to go on a 10 day South pacific cruise :D :D :D - but I want to leave you with something to chew over while I am away ;DSomething I read triggered me to look deeply into the settings of my freeware AVG anti-virus scanner. I am on Broadband and have my computer running all the time - so , when I fly the Sim (either online or standalone), I am not partial to turning off my AV programme - mainly because I am fearfull of forgetting to turn it on again.I don't have any particular issues with my Sim - it runs well except for some occasional pauses when it appears to be doing something with the harddrive (loading textures??) But I have found a setting in the AV programme where you can nominate which files it should scan - this is selectable to "all files" or merely "infectable files". The "infectable files" section is also able to have certain file types included or excluded. The default for this includes BMP files. Now, as we know, the Sim uses a lot of BMP files - so it looks like the AV programme may be scanning these before using them in the Sim. I can't really detect(via the Windows Task Manager) any great activity by the AV programme - but my question is, would it be OK to delete the requirement for the AVG to scan these BMP files. I can't say that I have ever heard of BMP files being infected by viruses.Thanks for any help Barry

It exists... but it's rather old... from 2004.http://antivirus.about.com/cs/allabout/a/bmpagent.htm

Let's consider something that I have long wondered about.We all have some variation of virus protection. I myself have MSN as a server who supplies, free of charge with my subscription, McAfee and Webroot Spy sweeper.Most of my flight Sim downloading comes from the AVSIM library who maintains files that have been uploaded from various sources.To protect the library I presume that it has some kind of virus protection.Those files that are intended for sharing, more than likely, have been scanned by the library virus protection program when they were uploaded. When I download the zip file my virus protection will scan the zip files again. Anything that could be hiding anywhere in my files should be found on a weekly scan. In my case that takes up a couple of hours for scan time.The other thing I wonder about is how vulnerable are we if we fly online with real weather updates if we have our virus protection turned off to conserve computer resources?

"virus protection turned off to conserve computer resources?"it's just not going to happen on my PC, no matter what anyone suggests or says, that is not going to be disabled on my end.and I would never ever advocate anyone to turn OFF their anti virus software when the machine is plugged in to the wall.if you intend to fly off-line, then get the latest weather first, then un-plug it from the wall, but NEVER disable / turn it off at any other point.

I used to use FSAutoStart, and among the services it would shutdown and restart was Norton Antivirus... During normal use, I would religiously let the autoprotect run, and let the scheduled scans run unless I was doing something critically important... The reasoning behind it? I'm not surfing the web or downloading new files while flightsimming, apart from weather downloads, and I was still leaving the separate firewall app running to block unwanted connections..Now, I'm using Kaspersky Internet Security, which is both antivirus and firewall in one. I'd still be willing to turn my antivirus off when flying flightsim, but I'm not willing to turn off the firewall, and I can't turn off one without turning off both, so now I'm stuck flightsimming with antivirus chugging away in the background eating up cpu cycles...I suppose it "should" be safe for me to turn off the firewall as I'm behind a router, but I don't take the chance....