My anti everything takes 7 hours to scan my computer
The
speed and
ability to complete an anti-virus or anti-malware
scan depends on a
variety of factors.
- The program itself and how its scanning engine is designed to scan: using a signature database vs heuristic scanning or a combination of both.
- Options to scan for spyware, adware, riskware and potentially unwanted programs (PUPS).
- Options to scan memory, boot sectors, registry and alternate data streams (ADS).
- Type of scan performed: Deep, Quick or Custom scanning.
- What action has to be performed when malware is detected.
- A computer's hard drive size.
- Disk used capacity (number of files to include temporary files) that have to be scanned.
- Types of files (.exe, .dll, .sys, .cab, archived, compressed, packed, email, etc) that are scanned.
- Whether external drives are included in the scan.
- Competition for and utilization of system resources by the scanner.
- Other running processes and programs in the background.
- Interference from malware.
- Interference from the user.
-- Using two security scanning engines at the same time can cause each to interfere with the other, cause systems hangs, false detections, unreliable results and other unpredictable behavior. Some online scanners will detect existing anti-virus software and refuse to cooperate so may have to disable the real-time protection components of your existing anti-virus and try running the scan again.To speed up your scans, uninstall unnecessary programs,
clean out the temporary files or use
ATF Cleaner first,
temporarily disable any other real-time protection tools, close all open programs and
do not use the computer during the scan. If the scan still seems slow or hangs, then try performing the scan in "
safe mode".
Note: It is not unusual for an anti-virus or anti-malware scanner to be suspicious of some
compressed,
archived,
.cab and
packed files because they have difficulty reading what is inside them. These kind of files often trigger alerts by security software using
heuristic detection because they are resistant to scanning (difficult to read). This resistance may also result in some scanners to stall (hang) on these particular types of files or just ignore (skip) them. Certain files in the
System Volume Information Folder like the Tracking.log (created by the Distributed Link Tracking Service to store maintenance information) have also been reported as a source causing some scanners to hang.