Excessive Scan Time

Not sure what to expect as I'm a new user of Bit Defender Total Security. First, installed on a W7Pro64 Dell T1700. After the normal reboots, etc, all the icons on screen were totally rearranged and the screen resolution and colors were much worse. A number of reboots again and long waits and changing things has seemed to clear most of that up.Scary.

Now for my issue with first full scan time on my Toshiba Satellite L505D W7Home Premium 32bit, AMD Athlon II Dual-Core M300, 3Gb DDR2, 320GbHDD. After install and several reboots, did Quick Scan and the started a full scan. After 20+ hours and 918,000 files, it is still going. Not sure how many files are on the laptop but 99Gb of the 288Gb are used. I have used Kaspersky prior (20 years) and never had a full scan require more than a couple hours.

I'm actually fearful to do a full scan on the desktop as it might take a week!

Any thoughts should be helpful.

Comments

  • Gjoksi
    Gjoksi Defender of the month mod

    Hello.

    The speed of a System Scan depends on many factors such as system specifications, large volumes of data, the computer resources in use by another software, it’s the first scan since installing Bitdefender, and most importantly, the number of archives & over-compressed files/backups. With every system scan, Bitdefender will index the files that have already been scanned, and the scan time will greatly decrease.

    For me, it usually takes 50 to 60 minutes to scan the whole laptop of 80 GB, including the Windows files, program files, data files (documents, pistures, videos) etc. on my laptop's SSD drive.

    Must say that in my case, "Scan task priority" for both System Scan and Quick Scan is set to "High", which takes much more resources (CPU, RAM, disk, power) than "Low" and "Auto", but decreases the time needed for the scan process to finish.

    To do that, Open your Bitdefender program, go to Protection -> Antivirus -> Open -> Scans -> System Scan, click on the three dots ••• button on the right next to System Scan, click on "Edit", change the "Scan task priority" to "High", click "Next" and "Save".

    Also, do the same steps for "Quick Scan", change the "Scan task priority" to "High".

    Regards.

  • Here is something interesting I've just found. First, nothing is running but normal services.

    As a side note, with Bit Defender closed, CPU usage is 1-2% with File Manager and Desktop manager being the user of that.

    Normal start and only No programs other than Bit Defender. It has now been over 25 hours and showing 1,135,956 files scanned. I let File Manager have a look at the Properties of all of C:\ plus all the sub folders including Read Only and Hidden. It shows the number of files as 218,801. I began watching the scan progress closely. I actually believe it is scanning files multiple times. I'm stopping the scan now.

    Gjoksi, I'll do as you suggested with Priority settings.

  • Gjoksi, I set the Priority as you suggested with 22:00 start times daily for Quik and weekly for Full.

    Does that sound good?

    Kaspersky was set for auto when it likes as it did not consume many resources.

  • Scott
    Scott ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited August 16

    Hi @DragoMaster

    With that notebook, it's just on the edge of what BD needs to run more effortlessly. If it were a tower PC with a heftier CPU cooler and multiple fans, you would probably be fine if the scan took an hour or two.

    https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/9671/

    My concern is even if you enable the high priority scan, it make take less time, but you could also be frying your CPU. Open up Task Manager while running the scan, and see if you're consistently in the high 60-90 CPU range.

    https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/37164/

    Since you were using Kaspersky, which has an excellent track record and your device is clean, if needed, I would forgo the weekly System Scan (overkill IMO), and just run a Quick Scan, and then if desired a 2nd opinion scan listed in this post. Whatever files you access, or are modified, gets scanned by Bitdefender's real time protection anyway. But that's up to you and your CPU :)

    Personally, I only run a System Scan on install, and once in a blue moon. After that, I let the quick scan, Advanced Threat Defense and on-access scanning take care of the rest.

    https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/2024/

    I'll let @Gjoksi follow-up with you from here :)

    Cheers :)

    All Bitdefender Home Product User Guides: https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/user-guides/ Using BD Antivirus Plus along with Glasswire free.

  • Petersl
    Petersl Defender of the month ✭✭✭

    Hi @DragoMaster

    Are there maybe any files that need to be unpacked by the bitdefender scanner, like .rar and .zip files?

    I have noticed on my systems that when have many of these files bitdefender takes a lot longer to scan as the bitdefender needs to unpack all of them first in the memory to be able to scan.

    If such files are several gigs in size then bitdefender will probable unpack them first in a swap file on your ssd/hdd and this will make the scan much longer to complete.