Very Long AVG Scan Times

[wolfsburged]

What are people doing with full system scans now that disk capacity is getting so large?

I have my laptop with an internal 250gb SATA drive which has about 180gb full, and an external USB 1 TB hard drive, which is about 800gb full, mostly of archival type data, and a few sets of full backups of my main drive. Due to the fact that it is external and also very large, it is a bit slow to scan.

I have AVG Free and it will take forever to scan. Right now it has been running for 13 hours and is not done... This is not acceptable as I try to run it overnight and usually undock my laptop the next morning to go to school.

Are there better performing AV packages, or maybe I should try to schedule only partial scans every few days?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Use lighter and better AV packages, such as AntiVir, or NOD32.

It's more about real time protection over the past few years, daily full scans are no longer necessary.

[lewchenko]

I scan once at installation, then turn off scheduled scanning. The AV package will check everything introduced to your comp as and when you do it/receive it so there is no need for daily scanning anymore.

I hear very good things about Norton's latest (V9). Forget any Norton release prior to this though. The new V9 package has some form of smart scanning that uses the pooled knowledge of all users of the package to work out if it needs to scan something or not. I read a PCPRO magazine article about it, and they agreed it really was super fast, taking only 8% of the time of the last Norton release to do a full scan.

However, a new licence is £50 which is a rip off! Maybe its cheaper in the states.