I do a quick scan once a week with MSE. For the last 3 weeks it's been taking around 6 minutes to do a quick scan. Previously it took about 2 minutes. It is still scanning about the same number of files. What's changed?
Hello, debodun.
What's changed could be a lot of things! The virus-definition database would probably have grown. That'll raise the time to scan immensely. Instead of scanning for only 1 signature per file: It may very well be scanning for 100 signatures per file now! That's a 10,000% increase in time off the bat.
It could also be due to the amount of data that it now has to scan. Perhaps you've added data to the harddrive? Installing a program (data), writing text files (4096 bytes on a 4K cluster setup; still data), registry entries (data), etc.
It could also be a combination of the above.
What samuria's suggesting it's due to hardware failure (mechanical disks do fail after years of heavy use or simply abuse). That could be a possible explanation. There's a lot of lacking data here to make any sort of assertion about the root cause of the implosion of the time to scan (from 2 minutes to 6 minutes! A 3x increase).
Your RAM may be over filling and it's relying on the pagefile swap. Perhaps your CPU is being bogged down. It could also be due to the HDD's I/O pipeline busting. An overly taxed HDD will make everything seize if not slow down to a crawl. It could be all of the above.
MSE scans on Windows 7 are taking longer for me, too, since a bit over one week ago.
Same thing on my separate Windows 8.1 system - the Windows Defender scans now take about twice as long.
Because of the latter I decided to not consider it an issue, or at least an issue specific to me or my system(s).
I did run a sfc scan. No issues detected. That took about 20 minutes.
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