Anti-Virus: Why scan hard disk?

[Andrew B.]

Once the hard disk is scanned for the first time by AV software, why bother having it do regular scans. If it is doing live protection, it will catch viruses as they come in and catch viruses as they go out. And if that is not enough, it will stop you from launching a program that contains a virus. So why stress your hard disk by having AV software grind through all the files once a week?

[George]

Originally Posted by Andrew B.

Once the hard disk is scanned for the first time by AV software, why bother having it do regular scans.

That's been my theory for years now. With anti-virus software being a lot better now than it used to be, and with the average user just knowing in general how not to be stupid in using the computer, there's just not a lot of concern anymore.

I've never had a real problem except once. Just after 9-11, I was debating a lot of Muslims, and coincidentally, I was unable to get into my control panel then. Maybe a virus, or maybe someone got into the system screwing around, or maybe just Windows being weird. But the time to be careful, at least for me, is during debates with people who do not like your positions.

I see the Pentagon just got compromised with a big worm in a big way. Apparently, it came from China. The Chinese have also been playing with the IMF and World Bank, and other major type institutions.

George

[CWM480]

Originally Posted by George

That's been my theory for years now. With anti-virus software being a lot better now than it used to be, and with the average user just knowing in general how not to be stupid in using the computer, there's just not a lot of concern anymore.

I've never had a real problem except once. Just after 9-11, I was debating a lot of Muslims, and coincidentally, I was unable to get into my control panel then. Maybe a virus, or maybe someone got into the system screwing around, or maybe just Windows being weird. But the time to be careful, at least for me, is during debates with people who do not like your positions.

I see the Pentagon just got compromised with a big worm in a big way. Apparently, it came from China. The Chinese have also been playing with the IMF and World Bank, and other major type institutions.

George

I kind of disagree.... because for me.. AVAST ( FREE EDITION ) has caught a couple things running a SCAN that the LIVE protection might of missed and got embedded into my system and running a scan caught it!

[Robin Springall]

Originally Posted by Andrew B.

So why stress your hard disk by having AV software grind through all the files once a week?

Because nuffink's perfect, Andrew: some scumware will get through your live defender.

[iamback]

I'm with Andrew - the on-access scanning will get the baddies, and that happens during backups which access all files. I started out doing weekly scans (at night), but stopped doing that when the scans didn't even finish overnight because there were just too many files to scan all at once.

[terrie]

andrew: So why stress your hard disk by having AV software grind through all the files once a week?

I don't have real-time protection or email protection turned on in my AV software so it ain't gonna catch anything live...'-}}

Terrie