After looking for a new a/v this weekend due to AVG soon stopping 7.5 & their new V8.0 is somewhat rather heavy with some pointless extras, I found avast. I chose this because it has an e-mail scanner, Avira a/v didn’t have this so I uninstalled it this morning. I have noticed it’s a little slower whilst scanning, not a problem really, but I have updated everything & set a full scan on ‘thorough’ mode, but it’s been going for well over an hour and is only on 37% ???.. Is this normal?
Overall it seems to be running just fine with my Comodo f/w. I’ve read on here of a lot of people who have left AVG, no doubt there’ll be many more.
You don’t mention the Standard Shield sensitivity setting, Normal is the default, nor do you mention your OS, CPU and RAM to get an idea of your system ?
Thorough is by its nature very thorough and will scan all the files on your system, excluding archives files (unless you check that option too).
You don’t mention how much data is on your HDD/s that and the system info mentioned above will be factors in scan duration ?
Archive (zip, rar, etc.) files are by their nature are inert, you need to extract the files and then you have to run them to be a threat. Long before that happens avast’s Standard Shield should have scanned them and before an executable is run that is scanned. Thorough is also by its design very thorough and perhaps a little overkill for routine use, were a Standard scan without archives should be adequate.
I have only ever done a through scan with archives once shortly after installation just to ensure a clean start state, but with XP for example avast will do a boot-time scan after installation if you select it, this I believe will be quicker and reasonably effective. Like everything in life things are a compromise.
Standard Shield is Normal. My OS is WinXP SP2, Intel Celeron M if that’s what you mean?, running 2GB RAM. I left thorough scan for over 3 hours and it was sat on 38%. My HD is a 60GB with 43GB free space. I’ve rebooted and set it on a ‘Standard’ scan to see how it goes.
It was more the MHz rating of the CPU, you should find the find a large difference in the time using the Standard scan.
I can’t recall if there have been any scanning changes in the version you are using, but in the beta build I’m using the scan duration even for the Standard sensitivity has reduced. So you may well have something to look forward to when the beta is released as a normal program update.
I have my scan setting set to high and for archives, hard drive is 37GB on an 80GB
It took quite some time to complete, but then it scanned every single MP3 and I suppose I could have unticked these folders prior to the scan, and that would have made the thorough scan complete quicker.
High is a settings for the standard shield not the on-demand scanner, which is Quick, Standard or Thorough.
If you have all your media files in the same folder exclude that folder from as the path on-demand scans (program settings, exclude, c:/media-folder-location/* the * is a wildcard excluding all files and sub-folders in the media-folder), that would save having to continually uncheck that folder from scans.
Personally I wouldn’t be doing a thorough scan for the reasons I gave above so no need to exclude the folder.
