Anti-Malware very slow on Vista?

[tkil]

Hi. I downloaded Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware a day or two ago, and ran it on all the Windows machines in my house.

On the two XP machines, an initial full scan finished in an hour or two.

On the Vista box, however, a full scan has been running for almost a day and is still not finished (currently: 262332 objects scanned, 23:40:26 elapsed). The program itself also being noticeably non-respnosive while running -- takes a long time to notice any mouse clicks, only updates the screen when prompted, etc.

This is after it wedged itself multiple times getting stuck in C:\$Recycle.bin; I had to go in and manually clear out the files in there before it would even proceed past that directory.

I see people talking about 1.33; I'll give that a shot and report back.

In the mean time, is there anywhere else I can look on my machine for sources of slowdowns? I've disabled as many unnecessary processes as I can, and according to the Task Manager and Resource Monitor, the CPU and Disk are both loafing. The Vista machine is also the most current and powerful of the three machines, so I assume that it's something about Vista that is making Anti-Malware so slow.

Details on this machine:

Vista Home Premium SP1

"Windows Experience Index" 3.0

Dell Dimension DIMC521

Athlon 64 x2 4400+ @2.30 GHz

2.00GiB RAM

32-bit

Thanks in advance!

[tkil]

I see people talking about 1.33; I'll give that a shot and report back.

1.33 doesn't seem to be any better; it's still freezing and taking a long time (and not pegging CPU nor disk).

I'm running AVG Free 8, and I disabled the "Resident Shield", in case that was the bottleneck; unfortunately, that didn't fix it either.

Thanks for any ideas you might have!

[exile360]

Greetings tkil. You might have a look at this link and follow the instructions there: http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.p...ost&p=45732

Post a reply to that topic afterwards as the developers are looking into an issue that seems similar to the one you're having. I hope it helps. Good luck.

[Tigger93]

If you are running a full scan, that is unnecessary. A quick scan is designed to catch all of the malware.

[tkil]

If you are running a full scan, that is unnecessary. A quick scan is designed to catch all of the malware.

Thanks for the tip!

I do still have questions, though:

1. If "quick scan" can do everything that "full scan" can, why have both?

2. If "full scan" is unnecessary, why is it the default selected when the program is first run? (At least I think it is; I've reinstalled it a few times and restarted it so often, that it might not be.)

3. Even if "full scan" is unnecessary, why does it work fine (and quickly) on XP, while being slow / freezing on Vista?

Thanks again for the info; I'm not actually all that worried about malware on the Vista machine -- I got involved downloading it to see if the slowness of my wife's XP laptop was caused by malware -- but I thought I'd do a complete scan on all the machines around the house, just to make sure.

[tkil]

Greetings tkil. You might have a look at this link and follow the instructions there: http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.p...ost&p=45732

Post a reply to that topic afterwards as the developers are looking into an issue that seems similar to the one you're having. I hope it helps. Good luck.

Thanks for the pointer. I ran across that post the other night, but didn't get around to implementing it.

If I have a chance tonight, I'll give it a whirl.

Thanks!

[Tigger93]

1. If "quick scan" can do everything that "full scan" can, why have both?

It's there for those who feel the need to scan everything. A quick scan is designed to catch all malware, the only thing a full scan will find that a quick scan may not is harmless leftovers.

2. If "full scan" is unnecessary, why is it the default selected when the program is first run? (At least I think it is; I've reinstalled it a few times and restarted it so often, that it might not be.)

Mine defaults to Quick Scan so I'm not sure.

3. Even if "full scan" is unnecessary, why does it work fine (and quickly) on XP, while being slow / freezing on Vista?

Many things can effect scan time, number of files, etc. There have been some freezing issues we are trying to work out; Exile linked to a thread about it.