Disable Avast notifications when you are playing games or giving presentations.

We know you appreciate the protection that Avast Free Antivirus provides, but when you are giving a presentation or concentrating on playing an important game, it may not be the best time for a popup notification to appear. That’s why we made it easy for you to silence Avast.

Turn on Silent/gaming mode

Activate the Silent/gaming mode when don’t want to be interrupted. This will cause Avast to run in silent mode when a full-screen application is running. This means your games or other full-screen applications will not be interrupted with annoying popups or other messages.

Turn this mode on quickly by right clicking on the orange Avast icon located in your computer’s system tray. A short menu will appear. Click on Silent/gaming mode to turn it on.

You can also access this option within the main user interface. Go to Settings>General and check the box for Silent/gaming mode. This will disable messages, popups, and alerts in Avast.

Change your Avast settings in the user interface

Turn off sounds

Silence notifications: Open the Avast user interface. Click Settings>General>Sounds and uncheck the Enable Avast sounds box. If you have a custom sound pack installed, uncheck the Use voiceovers sounds settings.

Choose the notifications you want to silence: Avast has six “events” that have notifications associated with them. These events are Threat detected, Suspicious item detected (we suggest you keep these two on), Potentially unwanted program (PUP) detected, Scan complete, Automatic update, and Firewall query. You have the option to uncheck these boxes as well.

Turn off popups

Occasionally, we offer our users other security products, but we understand if you don’t need to see the notifications anymore. Our customers who have a paid-for version of Avast, have an option to turn those off completely.

Once again, open the Avast user interface and go to Settings>General. Scroll down a bit, and you’ll find a heading called Popups. Expand that and you’ll see all kinds of options. You can discontinue seeing all popups, but you might miss a warning or alert, so we don’t suggest that. Instead, you can tweak the duration (how many seconds the popup appears) of the different types of popups. It’s all laid out for you, so you can adjust all you want.

Users of our free product have the option to change the duration of the popups.

Turn off Software Updater

Software Updater is an extremely useful feature because it notifies you about outdated software that needs your attention. You can, however, check for outdated software manually by opening the user interface. So if you want to disable the notices, then go to Settings>Tools>Software Updater and click on Customize. Uncheck the option Notifications (popups) enabled.

You can also turn off Software Updater completely in Settings>Tools. Move the slider to the OFF position.

Turn off Cleanup

Avast Cleanup is a standalone optimization tool that cleans and speeds up your system by removing bloatware, trialware, adware, and other unwanted junk so that your computer is running in its most optimal state. 

Instead of turning it totally off, we suggest that you modify the settings. For example, you can tell Cleanup to notify you only if it finds a certain amount of issues or after a specific amount of time, say, once a month.

But if you want to turn off Avast Cleanup pop-ups, then open your Avast interface and go to Settings>Tools>Cleanup and click the Customize button. Uncheck the box that says Always test this computer for performance issues. You can also turn off Cleanup completely in Settings>Tools. Move the slider to the OFF position.