Very slow startup scan - help please

I just installed on a very old AMD K-6 500 mhz system with 512 mb ram WinXP SP3 > Eset ESS 4. (I know - yikes - old system - what should I expect!)

The system has previously had NOD2.7 and recently 4.0. Both were acceptable and very good.

Uninstalling NOD (and insuring no other AV / anti-malware products were installed or showed any remenants) I restarted and installed ESS 4.

The start up scan of ESS is taking 10 minutes or more (maybe 13 minutes) and pegs the processor at 100% or close to it during that time.

This is repeatable on every restart or need for ESS to do a startup scan.

This is for about 12 GB data on a 66 mhz IDE disk that is very well defragmented [diskeeper pro], has no MFT fragments, has pagefile with no fragments. I have minimal startups - *very* minimal. I've used sysinternals autoruns and codestuff starter to review startup services and code and have them only to what I think are the few most necessary.

This isn't going to work - 13 minutes or so with a start up scan and can't do anything much until done. Something must not be right. Help!

During the scan MS Word opens up fine and fast. But doing much else locally with the system or getting a browser open is so understandably slow until the start up scan is complete. Even opening 'properties' on 'my computer' is slow, slow, slow during this start up scan.

I know - a K-6 500 mhz processor has much to blame. But NOD4.0 was ok. What could be going on? What could I be looking at? Is there some control to reduce some of the things that are being scanned at this time or to even lower it's priority more? I know it's important to run. But something seems wrong - even with a k-6 500 mhz oldie like this.

My assumption is that the start up scan should be fast (as I see it on 100's of systems I know of with NOD and ESS - although most have more 'horsepower' in the box for it - but not all do.)

Is there some particular item / area that the scan is looking after that might need some attention on my part to make more efficient? Or if absolutely necesssary - are there things I can do to reduce what's being scanned at that time?

Help please! Ideas please!

I did search and found another post on the forum about slow startup but it didn't seem very helpful. It admitted that turning off the scan would be unadvisable (protection sake). If there have been other posts with help then I'm afraid I missed them.

edit to add: I would also like to add that I will occasionally bring up the Windows Task Manager and order processes by CPU time during this wait and usually I see ekrn.exe (from memory so I may have the specifics wrong on the process name) at 80 - 89% or more and very very very few other processes competing for CPU time (at least at the granularity that the Task Manager provides). What I mean to say is that there are no other visible processes trying to start or complete start up. It's just mainly ESS working (as far as I can tell with my rudimentary tool!).

- David

 

If you edit the 'start up' scan you can choose what files to scan at the end. You can choose a bunch of options in a drop-down menu. You can do this in Tools --> Scheduler (Advanced display mode has to be turned on for that).

I think the higher you set it, the fewer files it scans. But perhaps a mod can tell you the difference between them.

You can also set the priority but its default already on 'lowest', if you set it to 'When idle' I think you will only increase the scan time more. It might be a idea to give it more priority on a slower computer so it wont take as long. You can of course test both out. You can also run the scan on the scheduler to see how long it takes.

 

I would also like to know how to reduce scan time on start up without putting my computer at risk.

 

yeah start up scan with NOD32 ESS v4.0.647 is very slow even with no programs running in the background.

 

The startup scan checks files that are found in the registry keys potentially containing malware. V2 supported only a limited list of such registry keys, hence it may seem faster. You can edit the default startup scan tasks and limit them to check only most frequently used files or configure them to run only when the computer is idle.