How to suppress idle scan notifications in Norton 2010 (Permanent Silent or Quiet Mode)
Posted on | June 28, 2010 | 4 Comments
How to suppress idle scan notifications in Norton 2010 (Permanent Silent or Quiet Mode)
This post is going to be formatted a bit differently than previous entries, the good chunk of people that read this are going to be from search engines and not my serial readers. Norton 2010 was about the highest rated paid antivirus on the market, but within a few hours I got irritated with the pop-up notifications that Norton is performing an idle scan in the background. I was even more irritated when I found that there was no real way to disable the pop-ups. It doesn’t do it while I’m doing something else but it is something else I have to close every time I come back to my computer after a time, and having moved from the totally silent Kaspersky AV 2008 I’m not cool with not being able to go totally silent. Silent Mode can be used, but then idle scans are disabled entirely and you have to turn it back on every day. The happy medium is Quiet Mode, which performs scans and only alerts you during actually important things. This is limited by default to a set number of instances, like disc burning. However, you can specify that Quiet Mode remain active while certain programs are running. This is the means we will use to put Norton in Quiet Mode for as long as we like.
Right click the Norton icon in your system tray and select Open Norton Anti Virus (or Open Norton Internet Security).
Under the Computer section, hit Settings.
Click the tab for Miscellaneous Settings.
Under Silent Mode Settings, click Configure next to User-Specified Programs.
Click Add.
Navigate to C:\Windows and double-click explorer.exe.
Click OK. You’re done!
Simple enough, and as far as I can tell it’s working beautifully. I just did this myself a few hours ago but haven’t had any notifications since. If this worked for you or you have a question just leave a comment.
This how-to is cross-posted at the official Norton Community forums at http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Internet-Security-Norton/How-to-turn-off-quot-annoying-quot-Norton-2010-messages-idle/m-p/243532#M116572
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4 Responses to “How to suppress idle scan notifications in Norton 2010 (Permanent Silent or Quiet Mode)”
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October 9th, 2010 @ 6:39 am
Oh what a great idea! I was sick of the limited Silent Mode and you can only seem to do it for 6hrs at a time in Win 7 64b rather than the 1 day in XP Pro. Kind of annoying! Especially that it kills everything.
Great idea and thanks for the hot tip. Am road testing it now…
March 6th, 2011 @ 7:05 am
thx for the tip to kill silent mode for good! Norton support said there was not a way!
March 11th, 2011 @ 2:38 pm
In personal testing it didn’t work 100% of the time. I uninstalled NIS 2010 shortly after writing this article and I’m happily back on Kaspersky Internet Security that, in four years, has never bothered me with an unneeded popup OR let in one piece of malware on the four systems I use it on. Really can’t sing it’s praises loudly enough.
October 26th, 2011 @ 8:54 pm
Hi!
I’m re-twit you post: to my @juxamist twitter