Is that a serious question? Any current hard disk transfers tens of MB per second from surface to buffer, and that’s the slowest part of the transfer for sustained linear reads. So about 20 minutes at 50 MB/sec. And I have a WD Velociraptor which is about twice as fast.
That’s also confirmed by the speed of Avira Antivir Free which I used previously – that program did a full test of the same amount of data in 30-45 minutes.
No, Defender and MSE are really just terribly slow. They are apparently not multithreaded at all, unlike Avira. They are particularly slow at unpacking archives such as my local installation of the MSDN Library – that’s where they seem to spend the most time.
It’s true that MSE seems very frugal in its use of system resources, even while scanning, but I’d rather have an adaptive (or at least configurable) use of resources so that the scan finishes faster when I’m not doing anything else on the system.
Since it’s certainly not the fault of my system (Core i7 920, 6 GB, Velociraptor) I would guess your 180 GB contain tons of multimedia files that scan quickly, and very few archives that need to be unpacked. My 60 GB contain very few multimedia files and some very big archives, i.e. the MSDN Library installation. MSE is really, really slow at unpacking archives.
It flew through my admittedly small 100gb XP partition and I’ve not clogged it full of thousands of files yet but its a thumbs up from me so far. Obviously far too early to vouch for how good it actually is, but it’s looking like a nice return to the days when a Virus guard did just that, nothing else, and left you alone to do whatever it is you want to do.
There’s a way for it to exclude file extensions, did you guys configure it that way before having it scan? I took out .wav and .jpeg, I was wondering if anyone had a list of common media type files.
If MS is permitted to advertise the existence of MSE and it seems competitive effectiveness-wise to the other stuff, I think some of these free packages are just not going to be able to compete in the marketplace. Why get xyz when you can buy MS for the same price (free)? I realize that some people won’t get MSE just because it’s MS, but I suspect MSE is going to really change the market here.
That’s basically the same argument that’s come up with regards to IE and Media Player, but so far the courts have found that it’s acceptable as long as pieces like that are separate, optional downloads. I’m not sure what MS’s plan is yet for what will come bundled with Windows 8.
I wouldn’t do that. There was one virus a while back that was actually embedded in JPEG files and used a vulnerability in certain viewers to infect systems…
That could be it. It seems very conservative about not getting in the way of other running apps - it’s clearly multi-threaded (I can watch several cores bump up when scanning) but it won’t use a lot of CPU time. I’ve got a Core i7 920 as well, and it rarely ever goes about 10% CPU time. If you have a bunch of packed files and it doesn’t want to max out CPU utilization, it may be slow at unpacking/repacking 'em.
I’m not sure this is a huge drawback in the long run. It would certainly be good if it was faster at this, but still… Even folks like you with a lot of compressed files suffer this big slowdown on that first big full scan. Incremental quick scans after that won’t re-scan a whole boatload of packed files.
Are you guys seeing slowdowns during a full scan? I mean, yeah, it’s slow, but not so much that it gets in the way of non-gaming stuff. I just set it to start scanning, then did e-mail and web browsing with no noticeable difference in performance. I wouldn’t game during a scan, but no big deal running a full scan while surfing the tubes of the Intarwebs.
Quick scans are quick (as the lolcat said), but full scans don’t get any faster when repeatedly scanning the same files, unfortunately.
Sure, it’s not a big deal overall since I’m not doing full scans all the time, and the rest of the system remains usable.
I did find one weird bug: while running another full scan (just to see if it got any faster), I tried to launch Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Esc to check on multicore usage.
And Task Manager locked up. I’ve never seen THAT before! I got the little taskbar icon with the CPU usage graph, but no window. Right-clicking on the icon dumped the context menu in the middle of my desktop… and the context menu did not react to mouse clicks. Attempting to re-launch Task Manager by various means had no effect.
Eventually I had to use Sysinternals’ Process Explorer to kill Task Manager. No idea what happened, I couldn’t reproduce the error.
Uh, is anyone else having extreme system stability issues with MSE? After coming back from sleep mode I’m getting lock-ups with real-time protection running, and failure to reconnect the hard disk if RTP is disabled… this didn’t happen before I installed MSE.
