Here’s something you could try to see if anything else is running at the same time as the AVG scan, using up resources, and slowing things down.
Close down all your other programs except those that normally run all the time such as Virus and Firewall. Start a manual AVG scan and set to fast. Press ctrl, alt and del on your keyboard at the same time. Windows Task Manager should then appear. Maximise the Task Manager window.
On the Processes tab make sure “show processes from all users” is ticked. The third column shows CPU usage as a percentage of the total. You’ll probably find that avgcsrvx.exe and avgscanx.exe (names may vary between versions?) are running and using in total up to maybe 95% but the total could be much less.
Is there anything else running that is using up more than about 10% of the processor. Don’t worry about the System Idle Process as it’s just the currently unused CPU capacity so that will be high if the others are low and visa versa.
Take a note of the details of anything in the list that shows a CPU number of more than about 15. If there’s something eating up resources and slowing down the AVG scan it may show up there.
If you have a lot of photos, movies, and other media on your computer you could try not scanning those file types. Under Tools – Advanced Settings – Schedules – Scheduled Scans, on the How to Scan tab you can set your scheduled scan to scan infectable files only and whether or not to scan media.
If you continue to have serious problems with AVG there are excellent free alternatives in particular AVAST that you could try. You shouldn’t have more than one AV program installed at the same time.
http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/avast_ ... avast.html
Quite apart from the above you may have many unnecessary programs starting up each time your computer is turned on. With XP you can see these by going to Start – Run and typing msconfig in the box. On the startup tab you’ll see a number of ticked boxes. I have only AVG, Zone Alarm, two Video card entries and a PIM similar to Outlook, in total 5. Any one interested in this sort of digging can find out more here
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist ... sklist.htm and
http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php
Hope that’s useful,
Alan
