I have avast Pro and for the last two weeks, there is no indication of a virus scan ran although it is scheduled to run each Friday night at 7:00pm. I check out the Scheduler and have all acans documented up to that point but for the last two weeks. Tonight at 7:40, it’s still running after starting at 7:00 as it still shows using much CPU in the task manager and if I try even coming here to post, everything is slow…it continues to run even now. What’s going on? It shouldn’t take 40 minutes to do a scan. Ashserv.exe is using up to 70% of my CPU on this ongoing scan.
…it finally stopped after running 42 minutes-an unacceptable performance. Nor has it indicated running in the Scheduler. I got nothing from last Friday night as well. So, I don’t know if it’s found a virus or not.
Is the scheduled scanning running in background yet or not, it’s finished?
40 minutes won’t be that long depending on how many files you have, if they’re archive files…
Scanning my system could take almost 2 hours and it’s fine… depends on your system…
Without knowing the settings you have for sensitivity, if archives are being scanned, how big the amount of data being scanned, it is hard to say if that time would appear excessive.
Of course if you have changed nothing in the above settings and the data hasn’t increased greatly yet you notice it is taking longer there may well be something else to examine. Do you have any other security software installed or other programs running in the background that may cause the resident scanner to try and kick in during the scheduled scan?
I do have other security software installed and quite a few of them initialize upon startup-such as BoClean, WinPatrol, Spybot, Ad-Aware, SpywareBlaster, SpySweeper, Zone Alarm Pro and Trojan Humter.
The resident scanner isn’t kicking in, its just the scheduled scan that does kick in at 7:00pm on Fridays like I set up months ago-it’s just that now it seems to not only take longer, but also, doesn’t show up in the Sessions as having scanned on that day.
However, shouldn’t the scan show up like it use to until Dec 2nd scan? That was the last time a scan was noted-nothing from last Friday or tonight. I had to go into the log viewer to find if it found anything or not and checked the chest files as well. The"Warning" section told me there was a “sign” of “Win32:NGVCK-E had been found in C:\Windows\ Sys32\pav,sig” file.
In the Chest I found, “MfNaxg.exe…Win32:Trojan.gen” which is probably another false positive.
I don’t know if any of those might somehow slow the scan down as they too might be trying to scan a file that avast is trying to open for scanning, have you installed any of them recently?
Until this latest round of program updates only full scans were recorder in the logs (that may well have been different for Pro anyway), but the latest should show the last scan in the Interface and I assume in the Pro logs.
Perhaps you should try a repair of avast. Add Remove programs, select ‘avast! Anti-Virus,’ click the Change/Remove button and scroll down to Repair, click next and follow. You need to be on-line to do this.
If that doesn’t work try, uninstall, reboot, install, reboot.
It would probably be best to download the latest version of avast and save it to your HDD, somewhere you can find it again. Use that when you reinstall.
Reference the possible false positive, lets not get away from what you started the thread about, the avast scan, it becomes confusing when there are multiple issues in the thread, in effect hijacking it yourself on to another topic.
I suggest you start a new topic for the possible FP with more information on the virus name and where it was located and why you feel it is a false positive.
I don't know if any of those might somehow slow the scan down as they too might be trying to scan a file that avast is trying to open for scanning, have you installed any of them recently?
Nope-had all those for quite some time…over a year.
Until this latest round of program updates only full scans were recorder in the logs (that may well have been different for Pro anyway), but the latest should show the last scan in the Interface and I assume in the Pro logs.
Up until Dec 9th scan, they had always been recorded. Don’t know what happened there or with tonight’s scan. Prior to this, they all showed up.
I’ll try the repair you suggested and see if that helps, but, won’t know if it does unitl next Friday. Thanks for the suggestions.
I dind’t change the storage method so, that shouldn’t be a factor. I don’t belileve I have a trace of Panda as I deleted that long ago after the first problem like that.
2:14am!!! It’s only 9:20pm here. Whee the world are you at?
2:14am!!! It's only 9:20pm here. Whee the world are you at?
Check out the Flag in my details to the left of the post, I'm in Oxfordshire, England.
You could always create a temporary schedule and run that today and confirm if it is recorded (and delete the temporary scheduled scan after the test), you don’t have to wait till next Friday.
I checked out the Sessions this morning and Dec 2nd was the last post of a scan done. I thought perhaps the long scan last night would have been recorded but it wasn’t. Odd thing happened on boot up today…the screen turned light blue before Windows even loaded and avast started doing a scan again. That hasn’t happened before that I recall. I just ended it since it did one last night.
Did you change the storage method from ODBC to XML?
If you have it could have a bearing on what is recorded if the storage method was changed to XML.
Obviously I can’t really comment on the functionality of the Pro version, but in the Home version’s Simple User Interface, the ‘Date of last Scan:’ was only recorded if a full system scan was carried out. This was I believe supposedly meant to record even folder selection scans with the latest version, but that doesn’t appear to have happened as I have just done a selective ‘folder’ scan and that didn’t change the ‘Date of last scan:’ either. So I don’t know if this might be reflected in what is happening to you and Pro.
He did answer him it’s just inside the quotes , the answer is no.Maybe he could fix the quotes… And 40 minutes for a scan sounds very fast to me i know it took avast to scan my PC up to 3 hours(with archive scanning enabled)
As for the question about the storage method…apparently the default setting is XML, which I never changed as indicated. In the “Trouble Shooting” page it says NOT to change this unless instructed to by tech support. So-it’s been like that from day one.
Maybe you have added a few large files (or even many small ones) since Dec 2? Just a suggestion.
I have 2 hard drives to scan … one 40 gb and one 80 gb … and neither are even near half full but it still takes a little over an hour to scan both … not too long for me because some of my files are big (photos, etc) and I let the program scan everthing that it can.
Hopefully, we find a solution to your problem soon!
CharlieO…I have an 80G HDD with about 58G left. I guess I don’t recall avast taking that long before. I have it set to scan entire HDD and if it takes that long to do a through scan I guess I can live with it. It’s just that it slows down any operation I may want to use (such as email) while it’s scanning.
DavidR-Don’t know how it changed if that’s what it’s suppose to be. I never changed it as I didn’t know what it was anyway. Nevertheless, I’ll uncheck that box, run a scan and see what happens.
That must not have been the answer as now there’s nothing showing in the Sessions area nor is anything showing under Scheduler! Until I changed it there was all the sessions ran back until the time I got avast some months ago. Nothing shows now. Maybe I should check the box again as that must have been the way it was because as aforementioned, I didn’t know what it was so, left it the way it was. By unchecking the box, I lost the sessions and scheduled tasks which was to just do a full scan, every Friday night at 7:00pm-that showed before but now is not.
OK-went back and checked the box and now I have everything back as before…except the last two scans I mentioned earlier. “Use XML storage instead of ODBC” is what it says in avast Pro and with that box checked I got the files back. ???
That is what it says in the Home version also and effectively XML is now your database storage method, which doesn’t make sense to me.
Obviously if you changed back to ODBC you wouldn’t have any Sessions as they wouldn’t be carried forward to the ODBC storage method, you would be starting with a blank sheet.
When you changed back to ODBC (unticked the box to restore the default) did you reboot?
Clutching at straws here have you ever had an errot relating to the following ‘dbscreateobject’ if so this may be why you switched to XML.