I did a scan on one of my machine with Avast. I scanned local disks on the “quick scan” setting. At the 40% part of the scan Avast detected a infection. I know that it’s a false positive so that’s not the problem. The problem is dialog that popped up prompting me to take action. I selected ignore so that the scan could finish. When I did this the scan continued but it was indicating that the scan was only 17% but before the dialog poped up it was 40% done. What causes the scan progress to change like that?
Yes, it can happen.
There are a few things:
- it’s rather hard to estimate the progress
- according to the current scanning sensitivity, avast! uses different criteria to estimate the progress
- when a virus is found (might be a false positive, but it doesn’t matter in this case), avast! starts scanning with a higher sensitivity from that moment (the idea is that if one infected file is found on the computer, which shouldn’t be a very common event, there may be more)
So, when the “infection” is found, avast! switches the sensitivity - which changes the progress estimation criteria - which cause the current progress to jump.