MSE scans

weyland yutani · 6 May 2012 at 17:32

I'm getting the feeling that MSE is completing full c: drive scans before it's actually done. Progress bar reaches about 2/3 of the way then it finishes, reporting no harmful items. It takes about an hour to scan 215GB used space of my 1TB HDD, does this sound about right? I cant find anyway of tracking what has been scanned, other than the item location text that whizzes by during actual scans.

I also use malwarebytes, with protection off and run a manual full scan once a week, always returns a clean bill of health.

Nikolai · 6 May 2012 at 17:48

I can't tell you if it is scanning all that you have requested it to scan. Though it can take up to 2 hours or so to scan 109Gb on a 160Gb drive. It has taken longer then that before. It really feels slow tbh.

I have found that once it spent a massive amount of time running through all the Program Files and Windows stuff, it flies after that. Not that there is a huge amount of stuff outside of those folders.

I'll run a scan and have a look see what it does.

Scougar · 6 May 2012 at 17:55

Ditch old internet files (i.e. your cache).

weyland yutani · 6 May 2012 at 18:02

I always run ccleaner before any scans, then run MSE, then after its done run MB so they don't conflict.

Nikolai · 6 May 2012 at 19:11

really weird stuff here. Running MSE on my laptop, its been running for 1:17:30 and still going, its barely past 10% looking at the bar 0_o and the cache was cleared before running the thing.

So either mine is very very broken, which I think is more the case, or your's is skipping stuff. When I stop doing stuff on my pc, I'll run it on here too and see what is going on.

edscdk · 7 May 2012 at 08:39

You don't need to scan anything if you have an active virus it will tell you, every time you try and run a file it and it's components / files it access' will be scanned. A full scan will only flag up inactive virus infected files ie virus that are not running

weyland yutani · 7 May 2012 at 13:53

Is MsMpEng.exe part of Defender or MSE? This is now running in the background since turning on my pc today. I have Windows Defender turned off so I assume its a malware/spyware scanner belonging to MSE but doesnt appear in the interface anywhere.

Broken Hope · 7 May 2012 at 15:38

Is MSE really that slow at scanning? My Avast scan flies.

e.g

Azuse05 · 7 May 2012 at 16:25

If it's going that fast then it's using file hashes or on access i.e. only scanning stuff that hasn't changed since last scan

m4cc45 · 7 May 2012 at 16:25

Depends on the number of files and sizes. The hard-drive could have a hundred thousand tiny files which will slow the scan right down compared to someone else having the same space used but one big file.

M.

Scryus · 7 May 2012 at 17:15

Indeed, smaller, but more numerous files will take longer than larger, fewer files. If you think it's done something wrong, try a reinstall, or check it against a similar virus scanner.

spenncerr · 7 May 2012 at 17:46

Broken Hope said:
Is MSE really that slow at scanning? My Avast scan flies.

e.g

No, it isn't.

Mine scans my 120GB and 2 500GB hard drives in a little under 4 minutes.

metalmackey · 7 May 2012 at 18:57

The first full scan takes a lot longer than the full scans therafter with MSE. It did it when upgrading to v4. I guess it saves some sort of database of file information on first scan.