Why do the experts here always recommend "Quick Scan" rather than Full?

[chadagwing]

Why?

[gtyhfy]

Hello chadagwing,

Here are two quotes by the MBAM staff:

The quick scan will find any malware that's active on the system that MBAM is capable of detecting. The only real usefulness of the full scan is detecting the occasional trace that get's missed by the quick scan, and even that's pretty rare. According to one of the developers the quick scan catches 99.9% of the malware that MBAM will detect.

Every known location where Malware can run and continue to infect you is scanned in a Quick Scan. Having non active Malware in a folder or zip file is of no threat unless you launch it and it's an actual installer for the Malware. Even being Malware but not an installer would still probably be of minimal risk in most cases.

Should you run a Full Scan. Well probably at least once at some point if for nothing else than to give you an added feeling of safety but again, this is typically what an Anti-Virus product is designed to do. They locate orphaned or non active Malware and remove them as part of their system scans.

If you have some free time, you can read the whole topic Difference between Quick Scan and Full Scan.

Thank you.

Edit - making changes for better presentation.

[chadagwing]

Nice, good support forums right here.

What if the malware was within an installer, would a right-click context menu scan find it?

[exile360]

It depends on what type of malware it is and how MBAM detects it as MBAM has many different methods of detecting malware, some of which do not get checked with a right-click scan.