Simultaneous Scanning

[Cinder Lane]

Sometimes scanning the hard drive with an anti-spyware program takes a
long time. Can two (or more) anti-spyware software scans be done at the
same time?

[Rube Bumpkin]

Cinder Lane wrote:
> Sometimes scanning the hard drive with an anti-spyware program takes a
> long time. Can two (or more) anti-spyware software scans be done at the
> same time?
>

Yes, but the performance will be no better than serially using the same
programs, and may be worse. Every Friday, during dinner, I run a full AV
scan, along with Spybot, AdAware, and SuperAntiSpyware scans, all at the
same time, on all of the computers in the house. It takes a while to
complete. The computers are really busy while they are running, with the
disc intensively thrashing.

RB

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Cinder Lane" <Cinderlane@webtv.net>

| Sometimes scanning the hard drive with an anti-spyware program takes a
| long time. Can two (or more) anti-spyware software scans be done at the
| same time?


This is NOT a good idea. It should only be done successively due resource ovehead and
program intereference. Additionally, it will not be faster as you will have two
simultaneous disk read operations going on simultaneouly and thus it will actually take
loger than if you had two successive "On Demand" scans performed.

The only time this should be done is when one is installed that performs "On Access"
scanning and you perform "On Demand" scanning. As the "On Demand" scanner scans the files
the "On Access" scanner may detect something the "On Demand" scanner doesn't have
definitions for. The drawback is that the "On Demand" scan will take longer than if the
"On Access" scanner was disabled.

--
Dave
http://www.claymania.com/removal-trojan-adware.html
Multi-AV - http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp