Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows 7

[sygnus21]

Anybody running Microsoft's Security Essentials on Windows 7 x64?

I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (retail upgrade) and after doing all my installs I installed Microsoft's Security Essentials. At first I did a "quick scan and it took like 10 minutes, however doing a full scan took at least 8.5 hours! This is going through 10 partitions on 3 hard drives.



By contrast Kaspersky takes about 60 minutes or less to do a full system scan the same system.

Is there a problem with MSE doing full scans and has anyone else noticed this.

On the positive side I visited a website posted by a forum member on one of the game forums I visit and MSE flag a file trying to install itself on my computer. Good job.

 

[Disk4mat]

10 partitions and 3 drives. Thats whats taking so long. You might try adding some exclusions. MSSE>Settings>Exclude File Types.

I added quite a few exclusions since there arent any be default. Every other virus scanner has a default set. So you will need to add some to MSSE. Thsi will speed up scanning... Here are some to get you started..

AVI, BMP, CHM, INI, ICO, JPG, HXW, MPG, MP3, PNG, TXT, WMV, XML

You can also exclude know safe folders under the Excluded Files & Locations.

 

[sygnus21]

@ Disk4mat, while I acknowledge what you say, it doesn't really answer my question.

What I wanted to know was why is it taking way longer than Kaspersky as it scans under the exact same conditions, that is, no exclusions. Again, without exclusions, Kaspersky takes about an hour to do a full system scan, MSE took about 8.5 under the same conditions!

Also, i'm aware that some Anti-Virus programs take a little longer during an initial scan, but given that, Kaspersky took a little less the 80 minutes to do a full system scan, compared to MSE's 8 hours

And to answer some basic questions...

No, I don't have two Anti-Virus scanners running on the same OS. What I have is one hard drive running Windows Vista which has Kaspersky installed, and my W7 hard drive which has MSE installed. I don't dual boot, I access the HDs through the BIOS. Just to clear those questions up.

So, has anyone else noticed MSE taking a long time for full system scans? 8 hours seems mighterly excessive, especially compared to Kaspersky, and Norton, which i've used for years until moving to Vista x64 and now Windows 7 x64.

Thanks

 

[Dinesh]

Did you run the full scan for the 2nd time? Usually, initial scan takes time. But the next full scan should reduce the scan time to a some extent.

 

[Disk4mat]

It could be any number of reasons from Kasp has a faster scanning engine to MSSE scans more file types to Kasp runs faster under Vista.

I just did a complete scan and it took 21 minutes.
C: 48 GB (11.5 in use)
D: 100 GB (17.8 in use)
X: 250 GB (117 in use)

 

[logicearth]

What I wanted to know was why is it taking way longer than Kaspersky...

Were you doing or running other I/O bound applications? MSE runs in a background thread with low priority so it won't interfere with anything you the user is running or doing. That can count for the longer period. MSE will instantly withdraw if a higher priority task is requesting the same I/O resources it has a hold of.

 

[sygnus21]

@Dinesh,

I'll run a second scan later to see if the problem still exists; and now that I think about it, logicearth might have a point about doing other tasks while the system was running as I was doing other tasks, so we'll see what a second scan brings without me doing anything else.

Still 8+ hours is excessive, even while doing other tasks.

Will post back later.

Thanks.