Kaspersky is one of the top popular antivirus but can be problematic for some users as it is not compatible with their system. Some experience instability and some slowness after installing Kaspersky. I have Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 genuine license but I don’t use it because it can be annoying at some times bugging me about every single thing. So I turned to Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 which takes much lesser system resource.

I did try to disable some unneeded protection from KIS such as Firewall and Content Filtering from the Settings but it doesn’t make much difference. I’ve accessed the Kaspersky “protected” registry and can see that there is a lot of settings there but I dare not modify them since there is no documentation on it. I found an interesting tool called KIS Tweak Util2 which is able to tweak both KIS and KAV hidden settings that is not available in settings.


KIS Tweak Util2 changes some undocumented antivirus features via values in the registry, which are responsible for antivirus settings, even though they are not exposed through graphical user interface. Some of the things you can do with this tool is to set the signature obsolete after 2 or 7 days, scan quarantine upon Antivirus launch, settings for battery level threshold on laptops, disable/enable boot sector scan, prompt for password when receiving a password-protected attachment and etc…

Although the name of the program is KIS Tweak Utility, but it can also be used on KAV. This tweaking utility is meant for advanced users and COULD cause instability if you tuned it wrongly. So make sure you’ve done full back up on your system before attempting to make your KIS works faster or better with this tool.

KIS Tweak Util requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or above installed in order to run. You MUST first disable self-defense before you can use this tool to tweak your Kaspersky product. Right click at Kaspersky icon at the icon at the notification area and select Settings. Then go to Options and “uncheck” Enable Self-Defense. Click OK to close the settings window. You can re-enable it back after you’re done tweaking Kaspersky.

KIS Tweak Util 2 has an official website which is at http://ktu.kasperskyclub.com/ and the latest beta version that can be downloaded there is 1.999.64.346. You can find a discussion regarding this tool in Kaspersky forum and the latest version there is 1.999.65.349 which is newer and compatible with Windows 7. It is important to always download the latest version because the older ones seems to have a lot of bugs.