F-Prot for DOS

Since the scanning engines in various AV products work differently, I don't think you can necessarily compare how they are functioning just by the sound made by the disk drive. That said, can you explain a little more about just how you are using F-Prot...

Are you running F-Prot for DOS just in an MS-DOS box under Windows, (is this on a Windows 9x system?), or have you rebooted into MS-DOS mode (either from the hard drive or a boot floppy) and then running F-Prot from there?

On my old Windows 95 system, just running F-Prot for DOS in an MS-DOS box under Windows, the disk access sounds is pretty intensive, but not more so than AVG or other scans, I think. If I run it from a boot floppy or reboot to MS-DOS Mode, it is extremely intense (more so than above). However, if I use "smartdrv" (the built-in DOS based disk cache) it sounds a little better (more efficient on the disk drive).

 

Since you are using MS-DOS mode, it might be interesting to try setting a large disk cache and see what effect it has. (I'm trying it on an old Win95 system myself right now.)

After entering MS-DOS mode but before you start F-Prot, try typing this:

c:\ smartdrv 20000

Smartdrv sets a disk cache up and the parameter is in KB, so that would be roughly a 20MB memory based disk cache. This utility is very useful if you are using MS-DOS mode for things that are heavy on file access, such as compressing and reloading the registry. Since an AV scan is really accessing a large portion of the disk rather than a few specific files, I'm not sure the cache would help, but it's worth trying.

At times, run at DOS is kind of fun.