All Done With Scheduled Scans

NAV 2011 does not appreciate it when you decide to schedule your own system scan. NAV would rather scan your system on its own schedule. Here are some of the stumbling blocks NAV threw in my way when I discontinued the Idle Time Scan and tried to create a Custom Scan of my system to run every Monday morning at 4:00 am:

 

1- NAV would not 'wake' my computer from standby (S3), even when I enabled 'wake the computer' in Windows Task Scheduler. I had to create a separate task just to wake the computer.

 

2- NAV would disable the schedule after the scan ran once. In other words, the scan would run once as scheduled, then never again. When I opened NAV I saw that my Custom Scan no longer had a schedule, and Task Scheduler reported that the schedule had been disabled. I eventually learned how to tweak the settings to 'trick' NAV into letting the schedule stand.

 

3- My scheduled scan took almost three-and-a-half hours to complete, whereas a manually-run scan of the same drives takes about 35 minutes.

 

4- The details of my Custom Scan aren't recorded in NAV's history, so it's very difficult to understand why the scheduled scan took so long. In fact, if you look at NAV's history alone you would never know my scan existed.

 

I see in the above a bit of the old "we know what's best for you" Symantec. Nevertheless, NAV's real-time scan is still among the best in the industry - according to multiple reviews - and the program does not slow my computer at all, so I'm sticking with it. However, I'm all done with its scheduled scans. And as long as I have to run a scan manually, I'll use Malwarebytes and get a second opinion as well.