avast is not telling you how much space is used on your hard drive, avast is not a disk space utility.
avast is telling you how much data it scanned. A lot of the data that avast is scanning for you is in the form of compressed files. avast unpacks that data temporarily during the scan to check all the contents. At the end it reports to you the total of all the unpacked data it scanned for you.
After removing the previous new download from my HDD and downloading and installing a fresh version of the updated avast home, I am still seeing that it is scanning over 39 gigs while the the total used space on my computer comes to 28+ gigs and that includes the XP restore files.
Where are these extra gigs the scan is finding coming from when they weren’t there yesterday when I ran the morning scan using the previous, non updated, version?
I have removed this post - not relevant
Have you read this thread at all?
I explained to you in the post above …
avast is not telling you how much space is used on your drive.
avast is telling you the sum total of every file it scanned including all the compressed files it expanded and unpacked temporarily during the scan. Those temporarily unpacked files are deleted after avast has scanned them but their size is included in the scanned data count.
Vlk explained clearly to you above that the new release of avast contains a new unpacker that, during scans, unpacks and scans more data than in the previous release.
Sorry…I did miss all of that explanation… I thought I had followed the threadsbut apparently not…
may not have read.
My point, which I think you are missing is, I know what is on this HDD as it was purchased new recently; it is used in a home where only two people access it and it is used solely for business related emails and files.
There aren’t any zip files stored on it.
There aren’t any CAB files stored on it.
There are Word files and Excel files and Access files and some powerpoint files and some email letters.
There are some graphics and photos.
There is software that was installed at the factory.
Dell says the total files content for what they installed would not come to that many gigs.
I can virtually add up the file sizes per folder and come up with a total close to what the C:\ shows.
So I hope you’ll understand I can account for nearly everything on the HDD and so for avast to suddenly inform me I have 39gigs of files on a computer that has limited use and more limited uses for storage and all the temp files are empty and I have only been able to determine approximately 28 gigs of usage on the disk and approximately 18 gigs of accountable mostly text files, I am still a bit doubtful as to the ability of avast to find all of these other files that it itself did not create.
Sorry…I must have missed all of that explanation… I thought I had followed the threads but apparently not…
My point, which I think you are missing is, I know what is on this HDD as it was purchased new recently; it is used in a home where only two people access it and it is used solely for business related emails and files.
There aren’t any zip files stored on it.
There aren’t any CAB files stored on it.
There are Word files and Excel files and Access files and some Powerpoint files and some email letters.
There are some graphics and photos.
There is software that was installed at the factory.
Dell says the total files content for what they installed would not come to that many gigs.
I can virtually add up the file sizes per folder and come up with a total close to what the C:\ shows.
So I hope you’ll understand I can account for nearly everything on the HDD and so for avast to suddenly inform me I have 39gigs of files on a computer that has limited use and more limited uses for storage and all the temp files are empty and I have only been able to determine approximately 28 gigs of usage on the disk and approximately 18 gigs of accountable mostly text files, I am still a bit doubtful as to the ability of avast to find all of these other files that I have to wonder if it itself did not create.
nrv,
You appear to have a Dell computer that is apparently quite new.
I too have a Dell computer that is quite new.
I rather suspect that similar system images would have been placed by Dell on the hard drives of your system and mine. I know that my system arrived from Dell with less than 5Gb occupied on the C:\ drive.
There are certainly compressed files (including many CAB files) as part of the system image placed by Dell on the system. For example the C:\i386 folder occupies 340Mb of space on my system, when that folder is thoroughly scanned by avast then 1.3Gb of unpacked files is reported scanned.
It appears that you have added a large volume of data to the system. Only you know the numbers and mix of the files but if a large part of the extra data is Microsoft Office type files, Excel, Word, Powerpoint then I think you may indeed have a valid concern about the data scanned count.
My testing shows that when avast scans (at standard or thorough sensitivity) any of these document types the data scanned count is about double the real size of the document (I just scanned one single .doc file; the number of files scanned was reported as 10 and the scanned size was double the real file size). This seems to be consistent for any of the MSOffice type files (a folder with 25 documents when scanned reports 158 files and scanned count double the real file size).
When these documents are scanned at the quick scan sensitivity the scanned count is the same as the real document size and the file count is correct too.
So if you have 10Gb of MSOffice files then avast is likely to report it scanned 20Gb and very many more files than you really have. This might go a long way towards explaining the “overestimate” of scanned data you are seeing.
If you have a folder just containing MSOffice type documents you might want to just run a scan of that folder and see what the results show.