Compared to ewido (fast scan mode) and XoftSpy, ClamWin takes several hours to scan an average C: drive. The worst of it is there is no progress bar.. no way to know how much longer it's gonna scan. Just some (meaningless) animation and some text showing what file its scanning and what files it couldnt scan, and other not-very-useful info...

Could you please come up wth some simple but reliable forumula for a progress bar, and also, could you have it save the number of files (and any other entities like processes and registry entries, etc) that it scanned in the PREVIOUS scan, and have it display this number above a number indicating which number (out of the total on the hard drive or entire system) of files the scan is scanning at a given moment (like, file #5678 on drive C: ) so that in addition to the progress bar we can also see what file it's at and we can assume that since our previous scan, there isn't a HUGE number of more files added since then, so we have some idea of how far along the scan is.

It would also be nice if there were options for shortening the time of the scan.

It just takes so long that ClamWin is preactically useless. Also.. does clamwin have an "active shield" mode? Can it be intigrated into the Windows Security Center so it doesnt claim you have no anti-virus protection if you dont have Symantec or McAfeee installed?

I'm a home PC user, and my PC is old (2000 model), so it takes about 1.5 hours to scan my 80GB hard drive. I reduced the scan time a little by using filters to only search for file extensions that are likely to harbor a virus. You could also scan only directories that might harbor a virus abd keep all downloads in one convenient directory to scan. Perhaps the programmers could also do a little more with the filters.

ClamWin shouldn't have to scan the entire directory. All it has to scan is files recently added, files that have recently changed, and/or files that are likely to harbor a virus. Pareto's law holds true for just about everything, and it says that 20% of the whole causes 80% of the problems. Taking this to heart then, only about 20% of a hard drive is likely to harbor a virus.

Regards,

No, that's not a good idea. If a infected file is scanned and nothing is found, and later on the signatures for that virus is included into the database, then ClamWin won't detect the infected file because it has already been scanned...

Well, that's a good point; however, I mentioned that ClamWin only has to scan: 1) recently added files, 2) recently changed files, and/or 3) files likely to harbor a virus. If there is a virus, there is an 80% chance that it will be in a file type that is likely to harbor a virus, so if a scan is composed of those three vectors, it would spot the virus upon addition of its signature to the database. I think those three vectors would give good (but not 100%) coverage, which can be enhanced (over time) with a couple of well-thought-out behavior vectors after they go real time/on access.

They could go back to using checksums, but I believe that virus writers have figured out how to falsify that by now.

Regards,

the engine used is clamav, not directly part of clamwin, yes is slow as hell, but it's the only opensource engine, virus db are actively updated
and also the engine. Except for the slowness I think clamav is a good engine.
On Access feature is being worked...

No complaints from here on the scan speed really. My PC is a 2000 Dell EPS T600r. I'm sure scans would be faster with a 2006 machine. The update frequency is real good--better than much of the commercial stuff. ClamWin isn't a piece of bloated software that takes over your machine. I like it.

As for the On Access feature, take your time and do a good job. I'll try to practice safe computing in the meantime, and I'll try to tell people about ClamWin whenever I can.

Regards,

100% agreed.

Also I dont have an issue with speed, as clamwin is on our mail server, 1 hour 3 hours who cares ....


Michael

The speed issue is still terribly aggrevative for me. I hope some of my suggestions for added features can be looked into by the developers.

Also, it seems that clamwin does not detect a lot of stuff that ewido, xoftspy and others DO detect. We are long past the day when all you needed was one single anti-virus program. :/

If only all virus databases could be merged! Perhaps a system of paying for/licensing virus databases and virus-finding algorithms could be developed, rather than paying for each different whole software package. (Hey, now that's an idea..)

I have also noticed that the best way to escape the family of spywarequake-style trojans (smitfraud) stuff is to get all the latest Windows XP Update patches!