Scanning Questions: Need more speed

I did my first on-demand scan with NOD32 4.0.468.0 and it took 5hrs 22min! Yikes! The longest that my previous A/V took was 2+15 for comparison and I thought that was on the slow side. I noted that someone commented on another post about playing with heuristics and achive settings. Got a couple more questions:

1.I've got a fair amount of video material on this drive. Would it be OK to make a scan exception for .avi and .mpg files? Do bugs find their way into these very often?
2. Is there a way to have NOD scan just files that are new or changed since the last scan?
3. When NOD gives a statistic such as "5hrs 22 min" for a scan time, does this include time that you've paused it to do something else and/or time that it waited for you to respond to a threat?
4. Is there a way to have NOD scan through non-stop, summarize its findings at the end and then ask you what you want it to do with suspicious files?

I know this is a lot, but thanks to anyone who might assist on ony of these questions!

 

1. As far as I know, viruses can't hook themselves onto any video formats, at least not the mainstream ones such as .avi etc. So you should be safe in turning off scanning for those formats.
2. Dont know
3. I am fairly certain it doesn't
4. I only know that you can get it to ask for a action each time it detects something, but not just a summarization of it and then ask for a action to be taken for each one of those.

 

Thanks, Fox. I tried another scan having it ignore .avi and .mpg files as well as archives. The scan time was a respectable 2hrs and 15min. Probably need to do a full scan occasionally, but I can live with this on routine scans. Thanks for your input!

 

No , you do NOT need to do full scans . That is why antiviruses have their real-time protections . Do perform full scans when you have infected machine and need to perform cleaning . No need to perform full scan just for checking - you are loosing your time.

The real-time protection + the memory scans performed after update and on-boot will protect you

 

One would hope that was the case. However when I ran Avira, a few trojans were getting by the real-time scanning. And Avira has one of the most robust real-time scanners out there. The other thing about Avira is that it also posts more false positives in both real-time and on-demand scanning. I never submitted the trojans for analysis so don't know for sure if they were real.

If you look at the A-V Comparative tests, you'll find that on-demand scanning is in the 93-98% reliability range depending on the A/V product whereas real-time scanning is only 50-69% realiable. Think it makes sense to do a periodic scan to try and catch something that real-time scanning might miss.

To quote ESET NOD32 Help section: "From a security point of view, it is essential that computer scans are not just run when an infection is suspected, but regularly as part of routine security measures. Regular scanning provides detection of infiltrations which were not detected by the real-time scanner at the time they were saved to the disk. This can happen if the real-time scanner was disabled at the time of infection, or the virus signature database was obsolete.

We recommend that you run an on-demand scan at least once or twice a month."

 

What operating system was this on ?

If it's vista or win 7 try excluding the c:\windows\winsxs\*.* folder.I never see viruses drop themselves in there, allthough They can I guess drop in and run from any folder.But I never see or heard of it, so I exclude it, knocks off about a half hour or more from the scan time.

The winsxs folder in Vista and Win 7 is extremely redundant, but unfortunately necessary.And it is the sole reason you absolutely cannot use fat32 file system with those operating systems.

 

The quote from the Eset help section has it right regardless of the Av being used.

 

My OS is Windows XP Home (SP3) on a 2003 vintage Dell Dimension 8200 desktop, P4, 1.7GHz, 512 RAM.

 

I am still on my point , previously written above (by me)

 

Noted.

 

How nice of you

 

Mabe you have a 5400 RPM hard drive in your machine.Those budget hard drives are up to 30% slower than a high performance 7200 RPM drive.Something to consider.

 

@Beforr: Your system is kind of 'slow' (cpu, ram) and the time you see now is quite 'normal' for that I guess having used Nod32 before. - Nod32 scans archives and all this stuff and that takes time. If you want to have a quick view over your drives very often you could try Prevx which I am only mentioning because it's scan is really fast and NOT to lead us off topic here. Of course you have to know then there's no archive scanning involved and it's a whole different technology (in the cloud) etc. - As I said .. just if it's important for you to scan your hdds very often and you want it done FAST! - I hated complete scans with Nod32 btw and I hate them now with Avira Premium, even if this seems to be faster on dual core at least and ssd helps also. - Doing it with Prevx and this never ending thing is shrinking from hours to a few minutes.

 

Thanks, everyone for all your inputs. This has been a pretty informative dialogue. Just FWI, I do use 7200 rpm drives, but some of your other suggestions make sense. Will look into them.