ReadyBoost causes antivirus to make computer unresponsive during scan

I recently updated Vipre Antivirus to Vipre Internet Security 2012; I did so today, in fact. I had been using ReadyBoost to speed up my video editing software earlier today. After updating my antivirus, I decided to run a deep scan of my system to see if the new antivirus found anything the old one had not.

I had left my flash drive in the computer with ReadyBoost enabled, and when Vipre's scan reached that drive, the computer started to hang and my CPU went up to 25% (one of my four cores was being used). My computer became very unresponsive, actions took 10-20 minutes to carry out, and I am currently in the process of what has so far been a 10 minute shut down.

I normally do not run ReadyBoost as my computer's specs are great without it, but it does immensely speed up my video editing software when importing video. I was wondering: have others experienced similar problems when running ReadyBoost?

writhziden said:

I recently updated Vipre Antivirus to Vipre Internet Security 2012; I did so today, in fact. I had been using ReadyBoost to speed up my video editing software earlier today. After updating my antivirus, I decided to run a deep scan of my system to see if the new antivirus found anything the old one had not.

I had left my flash drive in the computer with ReadyBoost enabled, and when Vipre's scan reached that drive, the computer started to hang and my CPU went up to 25% (one of my four cores was being used). My computer became very unresponsive, actions took 10-20 minutes to carry out, and I am currently in the process of what has so far been a 10 minute shut down.

I normally do not run ReadyBoost as my computer's specs are great without it, but it does immensely speed up my video editing software when importing video. I was wondering: have others experienced similar problems when running ReadyBoost?

Any chance we can get your system specs? My crystal ball is being repaired.

ReadyBoost basically creates a paging file of sorts on your USB device which Windows will keep accessing. What you encountered was probably simply a tug-of-war between the system trying to use the file and your antivirus trying to scan it.

Since it's pretty unlikely that the ReadyBoost file itself would present any kind of potential infection, I'd recommend simply adding it to the scan exclude list if your antivirus has one (but I don't know of any that don't).
That way you'd prevent this from happening again in the future.

zigzag3143 said:

Any chance we can get your system specs? My crystal ball is being repaired.

My specs have been added. Now you will not have to replace your crystal ball.

Corazon said:

ReadyBoost basically creates a paging file of sorts on your USB device which Windows will keep accessing. What you encountered was probably simply a tug-of-war between the system trying to use the file and your antivirus trying to scan it.

Since it's pretty unlikely that the ReadyBoost file itself would present any kind of potential infection, I'd recommend simply adding it to the scan exclude list if your antivirus has one (but I don't know of any that don't).
That way you'd prevent this from happening again in the future.

I believe Corazon is correct based on the GFI tech support I received on this issue. I kinda figured that was what was going on when it happened. I just found it odd that my antivirus had not been programmed by the developers to avoid scanning ReadyBoost drives. In the future, I will probably just disable ReadyBoost when scanning since I do not need it most of the time anyway. Just found the problem interesting.