Because of extreme incompetence and foolishness, i forgot to change from the built in MSE in windows 7 on my computer i bought half a year ago, and i changed to avast today because i found the files MSE scanned to be far too many. it found around 6 million files, while Avast free found 790k, which is around the same amount i could find on all of my Harddrives (i have two).
Avast finds no viruses from a complete scan, with all files checked, so the question is: Could i have a virus that avast doesnt find? or is there something wrong with the MSE for windows 7 that i am not aware of?
I am new to this forum, and haven’t had time to properly read the rules and where to put the different posts, and i ask forgiveness if this has been placed in the wrong part.
For those of you who answer to this, thank you very much.
Except on Windows 7, MSE/Windows Defender isn’t a full antivirus product, just spyware, on Windows 8.0 and 8.1 it does offer full antivirus protection, well detection rate is considerably less than Avast detection and protection though. As for why MSE/Windows Defender shows more files than Avast, each scanning engine is different, thus can’t really compare that portion of the programs
No security program have 100% detection .... if they did there would not be a malware problem ;)
ah yes, i do admit, that question was rather stupid of me xD
it found around 6 million files, while Avast free found 790k, which is around the same amount i could find on all of my Harddrives (i have two).
if i understand you correct you are talking about the amount of files scanned .... and not anything detected?
the way they count the file scan may be different from vendor to vendor so you cant compare
Yes, the amount of files scanned, while nothing has been detected. I understand that there is a difference in how they count the files, but 6 million and 790k is quite the difference. when i checked through my harddrives to see how many files and folders there were, i got around 720k ish. What i feared was that there coulda been a virus that copied it’s files over and over again, but that would eventually overload my harddrives, so that can’t be it. Well, if it doesnt find anything, and i still have all my money and accounts, i guess it shouldnt matter all too much xD. Than you for answering so scary quick, much appreciated.
Aye, that is true. unfortunatly i was not intelligent enough to acctualy check wether MSE on windows 7 were the same as windows 8 (as i had that on a different computer) and didnt really care for half a year. well, nothing is found on a completely throughout scan, so i presume there is nothing to worry about so far. Thank you for answering so quick, much appreciated.
one engine may unpack evry compressed file, the other not.....
one engine may count evry file inside a compressed file and the other may not....
one engine may drop scaning of some file types
As said you cant realy compare as evry scan engine work different
One of the great new features of avast 5 is the persistent cache, a mechanism which allows us to skip rescanning of certain files. In particular, this applies to files which are on our internal whitelists, as well as files which are digitally signed by trusted publishers (we maintain a relatively short list of software publishers that we trust, and we consider any files produced and digitally signed by these publishers as safe).
Just to set the record straight, MSE is a full antivirus product. Defender in Windows 7 is a Malware scanner program.
In Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows 10 The AV is now called Defender.
Thank you Bob, I realized later on made a boo boo with MSE/Windows Defender comment earlier, just didn’t have the time to get back to edit it properly, thank you for clearing that up though. Glad though I stuck with Avast as I feel that gives the best possible protection, did try MSE back in 09 a bit, and Defender on 8.0 Windows for like a little bit, but after seen how slow it scans, stuck with Avast Free since
