In the last several months I've noticed the Norton Full Scan is taking longer and longer to complete,although If I shut down my computer at night I can resume the scan where I left off the next morning. Sometimes I do pause the scan so I'm not concerned about the length of the scan as the number of files scanned. I have the scan set for the Full Scan once a week. My last Full scan had 1,884,957 files scanned. The week before it scanned 1,820,236 files. *Is this unusual?
Holly
In the last several months I've noticed the Norton Full Scan is taking longer and longer to complete,although If I shut down my computer at night I can resume the scan where I left off the next morning. Sometimes I do pause the scan so I'm not concerned about the length of the scan as the number of files scanned. I have the scan set for the Full Scan once a week. My last Full scan had 1,884,957 files scanned. The week before it scanned 1,820,236 files. *Is this unusual?
Holly
Holly wrote:In the last several months I've noticed the Norton Full Scan is taking longer and longer to complete,although If I shut down my computer at night I can resume the scan where I left off the next morning. Sometimes I do pause the scan so I'm not concerned about the length of the scan as the number of files scanned. I have the scan set for the Full Scan once a week. My last Full scan had 1,884,957 files scanned. The week before it scanned 1,820,236 files. *Is this unusual?
Holly
The number of files scanned will be different every time you run a scan. The number can go up or down, and sometimes by a significant amount. This is nothing to worry about. You are protected.
Windows itself creates and deletes temporary files all the time. Other applications can do the same thing.
When Norton scans the files, it takes note of whether a file is safe or not, and can skip the file on the next scan if the file has not changed. When new virus definitions are downloaded, the file will be scanned again.
There are also Trusted files that will not be scanned again unless they are changed.
From your reply I'm assuming you don't think 1,884,957 files that it scanned last week is unusual. It takes many hours to scan that many, although I do pause at times and turn my computer off at night and resume the scanning the next day. Also do you know how frequently it is recommended you do a full scan if you don't suspect any problems. I''ve been doing a full scan weekly.
Holly
I'm replying to Peterweb.
The default for a full system scan is once a month. Because a quick scan is run after every virus definition update, the full system scan is not needed as often.
I have about the same number of files on my system, and it does take quite some time to do a full system scan. When I do a full scan, I set it up to run overnight.
Holly,
I'll do a 'me too' to Peter's comments. 