A-free squared 3.5 taking 4 hours to scan!

derrick

Can someone please explain why,whilst running nothing else, it is taking 4 hours for A-free squared 3.5 to scan my computer?

The first image is after 2.5 hours the second image is when finished after 4 hours, basically nothing found!

I use the scan as shown in the third image,"deep scan"

I was not using any other programmes except having OE open, but previously I have been using Firefox whilst scanning, and it never took that long, it has been getting progressively longer during the passing weeks.

Should I do away with this programme? I also use Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware SE and SuperAntiSpyware Personal on a weekly basis.

A-free squared never used to take this long, I had already used S&D and SuperAntiSpyware, which had found nothing; -

weegie.geek

It'll get longer as you acquire more files on the hard drive.

Have you noticed the performance of anything else suffering? Taking significantly longer to load windows or the like?

john_s_2

I've been running A2 for a couple of years now (not continuously!) and it's always taken the longest. I've always put this down to it doing a more thorough search, and taken some comfort from that. I don't know how misguided that is...

I also use it on four different PCs - with similar run times on each one.

I haven't run it for a few weeks now so I couldn't say if it's taking longer than before.

Shazmar_2

A2 free takes about that long to scan 2 hard drives on my comp 500 and 320 gig. As a rule I only do a deep scan about once every 6 weeks or so, but do a quick scan weekly. I use an always on scanner (Avast) as my main anti virus scanner and just use A2 as a back up check. There is no conflict between them on my machine so you may wish to go down this road. Also you could let A2 run overnight to do its work.

Nilrem

As mentioned above, the more files you have/larger drive the longer the scan, also a deep scan can take a lot longer than a normal scan as it's having a thorough look (normal scans might only look at the files and look for exact matches, deep scans might look for close matches as well, and look inside zip/rar files).

It normally takes me about an hour or two for an avast normal scan, but 4-5 hours for an avast deep scan (fairly beefy PC with 4 SATA drives).

derrick

weegie.geek wrote: »

It'll get longer as you acquire more files on the hard drive.

Have you noticed the performance of anything else suffering? Taking significantly longer to load windows or the like?

No, not that I can tell.

I have an 80GB hard drive, partitioned.

C Drive 19GB, used space 14.1GB

New Volume D,(partitioned), 57.1GB, used space 353MB.

So there isn't a lot to scan, I am sure up until a couple of months ago it only used to take about an hour, the only thing that I have recently done,(on Tuesday) was to upgrade from AVG 7.7 to AVG8.

I have always used the deep scan.

As well as the two mentioned above I also use Widows Defender,SuperAntiSpyware,Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware SE personal weekly.

Conor_3

derrick wrote: »

No, not that I can tell.

I have an 80GB hard drive, partitioned.

C Drive 19GB, used space 14.1GB

New Volume D,(partitioned), 57.1GB, used space 353MB.

So there isn't a lot to scan,

The size is irrelevent. There's, according to the screenshot, 205,124 files. That's the important figure.

And was Spybot S&D being run as resident? If so, that'll have been scanning at the same time as A2 and as well as your antivirus program so basically you've got 3 programs scanning each of those 205,124 files.

derrick

Conor wrote: »

The size is irrelevent. There's, according to the screenshot, 205,124 files. That's the important figure.

And was Spybot S&D being run as resident? If so, that'll have been scanning at the same time as A2 and as well as your antivirus program so basically you've got 3 programs scanning each of those 205,124 files.

Not sure what you mean by "resident" but I use all of the ones I mentioned manually/ individually once a week,except I think Windows Defender is scheduled to run once a week,(Monday), and AVG just has resident shield running, to which I will also run/scan once a week.

But as I have previously said, it never used to take that long to scan, and I do not think I have added that many files over the last few weeks.

Would I be better just using the smart scan weekly and maybe the deep scan monthly?

Shazmar_2

If you have AVG resident shield on it should be stopping anything getting on to your computer as it is always on and scanning for virus's before they enter your machine. Therefore just update your A2free every week and then run a Quick scan once a week just to make sure nothing has got past AVG. Run an A2free deep scan every 4 - 6 weeks at a time when you know you won't be using comp for a few hours.

derrick

It is still taking 3¼ hours when only using the Quick Scan! I might as well continue with the Deep Scan that takes 4 hours!