21 Million Bytes??

kittkatt

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The very first thing I do when I get on the computer is update my anti-virus program. Today when I started downloading it, I noticed that it had over 21 million bytes. It normally is around 50,000 bytes. I don't understand why the package was so huge.
Is that normal?
 

snake_lady

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What antivirus are you using?

I use AVG free, and the size of the updates varies from day to day. Like today, it was 11692 bytes because it was only updating virus definitions. Sometimes there's updates to the program itself, (or malqare def's, spyware def's, etc.) which is what I would guess was the case of your increase in size. (updated version of the proggy)

See what it was like today... I would 'guess' it will probally be closer to normal.
 
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kittkatt

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I don't know how many bytes it was today, b/c by the time I got on the computer, the update had already been automatically installed. I'm thinking that the 21 million plus was a newer antivirus program itself, and the smaller ones are just additions to the program - if that makes any sense. I'm not too savvy with all this computer mumble-jumble.


I'm using Avast, BTW.
 

aileen06

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I just read that Avast released a new version so that's probably why it was so big.
 
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kittkatt

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Originally Posted by Aileen06

I just read that Avast released a new version so that's probably why it was so big.
I think that's probably what it was, too. Today when I updated it, it was closer to normal - 16,000+ bytes. The only other time I noticed it being so big was about a week or so ago, at around 1,000,000 bytes.
 

coaster

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I've noticed that with many applications nowadays if you have automatic updating turned on, they automatically download new versions of the application itself, as well as the data files. It can be kind of confusing to be expecting 16K and find 21M coming down the pipe.
 
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