General Technology & Troubleshooting Topics

[#1]

After my husband had a problem with the computer this afternoon, I ran scans with AVAST and Norton. AVAST stated that it coulod not scan the following file because it is a decompression bomb. (C:\Program Files\Toshiba\TOSAPINS\COMPS1\TOSHIBAGame Console0\MANUAL\b27927b.exe\wtsetup.exe) On the avast forum, which came up when I googled decompression files, they say it is nothing to worry about. My husband would like for me to find a way to secure the file so it cannot be attacked. I am not really certain I should do this. Any ideas? Has anyone else faced this? I do not want anything to happen to this system. It is new to us, and, due to lack of protection, we lost our last system. Please advise. Thanks for any input.

[#2]

Run the current update definition for those programs.  The file you described is safe.  You can go into the Tools menu for those programs and do an 'exclusion' from scan venue.  Run on one anti-virus program on your unit.   You can run the scan spect rom their web site without any problem.

[#3]

A 'decompression bomb' is Avast's way of describing a file (such as a ZIP or RAR file) that unpacks into a very large quantity of data.  There are a lot of legitimate files that do this and therefore you can get a lot of false positives from some virus scanners.  For a file that you know is legitimate, there is no problem.  You don't need to be concerned about it.  I don't use Avast, but most scanners have a way of marking a file as harmless.  That would be the thing to do in this case.  The file isn't prone to outside attack, it was just flagged because Avast considers it to be potentially suspicious because of the volume of data in the unpacked file.