I’ve posted some threads about unexpected scans and understanding the log files. The details therein all seem to indicate that a full scan scheduled daily at 5am does not awake the computer for the scan as it has been set to do. At this point, I believe that I can now confirm this with a good degree of certainty. I realize that a full scan every day is way overkill, but I intend to scale back to something more in line with suggestions in this forum after I figure out why the scan isn’t waking up the computer.
How prevalent is this problem of scheduled scans not awaking the computer when scheduled? I was wondering if my experience is an odd ball. What might be some of the causes?
Personally I have always said, the term waking is somewhat weird, waking it up from what as there varying degrees of system, sleep, standby, hibernation, in the different OSes, etc. etc.
I think the deeper the sleep, standby, hibernation the less likely it is to come out of it to run the scheduled scan. It also might depend on what your notebook BIOS settings might be as there are varying commands for Wake On, e.g. Wake on USB, so any activity on USB would wake the system, so I don’t know what the avast scheduled scan Wake would be considered.
There is no clear interpretation of how it wakes the system for a scheduled scan and if that is covered by one or more of the BIOS Wake On options.
My netbook I have set to literally go into hibernation after a very short time to conserve battery power. One of the other aspects is in the Scheduled scan settings and that is not to start the scan if on battery, etc. I have never worked out if even though your using mains power, with the battery still connected if that counts as running on battery.
Thanks for confirming the sanity of my confusion, if not dispelling it!
The Windows XP on my old laptop has only one sleep mode – standby. Well, actually, as you said, some people might interpret hibernation as a kind of sleep, but I don’t have nearly the same wide array of sleep options that current laptop models have. No Wakeup on LAN that I’ve ever heard of.
As for not scanning on battery mode, I’m sure that’s not the cause because the scan starts when I wake the laptop. I don’t change anything like pull out the battery or the power cord.
Yes the XP Power settings are more limited and I have my desktop set to turn off the monitor after 5 minutes, the hard disks after 15 minutes and go into standby after 20 minutes. Never could see the sense in using a screen saver.
Though that would be an option to replace your standard scheduled scan with the screen saver scan.
Hmmm, interesting. I just googled it and will look into it further. However, I suspect that I need to set the time-to-standby to much much longer in order to allow the scan to complete (not my favourite option, but maybe my only one). Right now, standby kicks in after 15 minutes of idle time. Now, if the scan is occuring, then I’m not sure whether this is still defined as idle time. Currently researching it.
I didn’t mention an obvious point in my last post. Of the two “sleep-ish” modes in XP, Standby and Hibernation, Standby is the least deep sleep. So I somehow doubt that Avast’s wakeup is being flustered by an overly deep sleep mode. Unless it wasn’t designed to wakeup in XP. Not that it is necessarily relevant to Avast scheduled scans, but XP Scheduled Tasks do wake up the laptop successfully.
OK, now this is bizzare. After all this complaining that I’ve been doing, it turns out that the 5am scan did launch successfully this morning. So sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. I’d be open to suggestions as to how to go about identifying the factor that determines whether the scan will launch as scheduled.
