Norton Virus Scan took 10 hours

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A friend ran Norton AV 2003 virus scan and it took over 10 hours to complete. When completed, it said that it had scanned over 202,000 files. She has only 2.56 MB of used space on her hard drive. Where would these 202,000 files be and why is NAV taking so long to run the scan? Any suggestions?

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Is your friend hooked to a network? If so, did she enable a network scan?

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She is not in a network. It is a stand-alone computer.

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Was there one or more CDs in the CD drives, and was NAV enabled to scan them?

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There was no CD in the CD drive.

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To find the number of files on the drive you could use an enumerating program like TreeSize Pro, which also does drill-down.

Either get the free version or a trial of the full version.

TreeSize says I have 97,392 files on my PC, but Norton reports scanning slightly more than 250,000 (because of ZIPS and especially CABs). It usually takes between 25 and 45 mins, but I have known it take over two hours on occasion — and I have a fairly fast CPU and hard disk!

John

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When I do a complete scan with Norton, it indicates in excess of 400,000 files scanned (includes zips & cabs) and it usually completes in a little less than one hour. My system is a 2.4 Ghz P4 with 512 MB Ram.

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Ok, one other possibility. What other programs or processes were running when the scan was run. If there was a program running that was updating a file on the disk, then Norton will rescan the file every time it is updated. If the other program is updating a file frequently, then NAV can run for a very long time, and possibly never finish.

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I don’t know of ANY computer that has a total of less than 3 MBytes of used space on its single hard drive.

Please have a look and tell us:

• What drive letters exist on this computer and what does each one correspond to (hard drive, CD, floppy, etc.)
• How much space is really used on each hard drive on this computer
• How many files are on each hard drive
  [/list]StuartR

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I sit corrected – I meant 2.56 Gigabytes of used space. Mea Culpa.

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This computer has one hard drive ©, a floppy drive (A) and a CD drive (D). As I said (with great embarrassment) in my corrected reply, the C hard drive has 2.56 GB of used space. How do I determine how many files the hard drive has on it?

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The easiest way to check the number of files on your hard drive is to select the drive in Windows Explorer and select all files in the top lovel directory, then right click and choose “Properties” from the drop down menu. (Assuming you are running Windows XP).

As others have said, NAV will also scan inside ZIP and CAB files, which will increase the number of files.
To get a rough idea of the number of ZIP or CAB files, you could type the following command to a command prompt…
DIR /S C:*.CAB > cabfiles.txt
DIR /S C:*.ZIP > zipfiles.txt
this will create files called cabfiles.txt and zipfiles.txt with a list of all the CAB and ZIP files on the disk.

Is your friend’s computer quite slow? What type of CPU and memory size does it have? What operating system is it running?

StuartR

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Open a command prompt window and do a dir/s.

However, that will not tell you how many files will be scanned as NAV will also scan files within archives, e.g.,.zip and .cab files.

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But StuartR ‘s method in his earlier post does.

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that duz not tell u how many files are in the .zip amd .cab files.

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Absolutely correct.

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If NAV is set up to scan inside archives, cab files etc. then 202,000 files is quite conceivable. I’d be having a detailed look at such settings – terms like “complete scan” or similar.

Alan

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I find that clearing out my temporary internet files makes a significant difference to the time taken for a virus scan, and there can be a lot of them, so that could contribute a fair proportion of the 202,000.

Ian

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