Hello,
I have been using this laptop for exactly 3 years now. I am a student so it serves me mainly for studing puropses, downloading files, programms and games as well. I am using Norton360 since the very beggining as well as MSE and as a backup tool I use mbam, which i only run to specifically scan the computer from time to time.
The thing is for the first two years scanning the whole laptop was taking maybe 20 minutes and the output was like 300k files being scanned. The last year I was using this laptop as usual, nothing specific being downloaded except for some programming tools, diablo 3 maybe and loads of pdf files and few compilers. The scanning duration rocketed from those 20 minutes to like a few hours and the files count went to the whooping nearly 2kk...that's one thing. The system partition had initially 500 GB free space and I suppose I was using like 80-100Gb, which now is 180GB.
I know that there are more and more files after some time and I do not really care about the disc space. But I have a feeling that 2kk files with like 1.5kk appearing during one year of simple using is kind of high. I tend to delete most of the files and programmes I no longer use.
I mention all of the above because I feel it might be connected to the issue I am worried about the most right now.
I have run a full scan today and after like 5 hours N360 did not find any threats appart from cookies. But then I checked the history of defence (or whatever the option is called in english, I am sorry I've got a polish version and it's just a rough translation). There are entries which are marked by N360 as safe...(I mean that N360 sends a "static submission" and it's marked as safe) some of those I know, 2 of them I believe had infected my other computer years ago and might have been blocked by N360 in past on this laptop, not sure about that tho. Those include:
-Suspicious.Clud.7(or 9)
-WS.Trojan.H
Those are not single entries, there are nearly dozen identical entries for each of those 2 during one scan.
And the other thing which i find new as of today is that svhost.exe usually is being blocked by norton once in a while during full scan, sometimes 2 or 3 blocks happen one ofter the other but today there is a huge block of like 80 entries in history one by one...I know it's usually nothing but it's strange this time to me.
I would like to hear from some users and preferably from someone of the norton staff too if I should be worried about mentioned things.
Oh and btw. today while logging on the facebook I got a notification that someone tried to log in from China as me. I don't recall logging into facebook from any other device apart from this laptop and my smartphone so it just added some uncertainity.
EDIT:
I just found out that just a buckup consumes over 33GB of the disc space but nontheless those are a few files that imo should be traded as such by Norton. I also forgot that I downloaded AutoCad but well it's not like that consists of houndreds of thousands of files...I actually checked how many files are being stored on the disc and it's closer to 600k, not 2kk.
Cheers,
Tom