Hi i just install calmwin latest version today (ver0.90.1.1) and ran a full scan on my local disk to check if my files gets infected of not besides checking the effectiveness of the av. What i notice is a considerable amount of time needed to scan the whole disk that almost took me a whole day just to let it finished. To be compared with other antivirus available Free or commercial it is indeed very slow as i experience faster scan speed with avira and norton which i previously installed before. Though the slow scanning speed calmwin still has a good detection rate as my friend use it once and successfully clean his comp out of his mess. As i know calmAv is an open source project run by some volunteers what i really hope is that the Dev would try to improve the scanning speed that would make this product better that it is. Although its a on demand scanner maybe the Dev will try to make a full av out of it by implementing a resident scanner and some other stuff like auto updater and E-mail scanner in the future maybe? maybe a better and colorful GUI would help too .

While I'm not a ClamWin developer, and haven't looked at the source code to see whether there's any way of speeding up the basic scanning algorithm, one thing which commercial products often do is to keep record of files they have previously scanned, their size, modification date, and (optionally) some sort of checksum which can be run really quickly, like MD-4. Then, rather than scan everything, they just look at their database to see if the file(s) concerned appear to be unchanged since the last scan. If so, they're skipped. Assuming that doing such a check is 10 times faster than just scanning, and that 90% of your files are unchanged between scans, it will only take 20% as long to do the second and subsequent scans. If you dare skip the checksumming, and only look at the file size and modification time, you could cut it down to more like 10%-11%. But this isn't a minor tweak, this would take someone quite a while to code into a Windows app. On a Unix/Linux system it would be a 20 minute scripting job, but I don't suppose that's any consolation...

A much simpler modification which might make you happy would be if ClamWin defaulted to running at the lowest possible priority. Then it would run slightly slower than it does now, but wouldn't interfere as much with your doing other things on your computer while it was running. Scans being lengthy isn't such a big deal when they aren't hogging most of the CPU + i/o bandwidth.

Development on an improved ClamWin version 1.0 has stopped for a year or so due to problems implementing the real-time scanning filter driver. I understand that "intelligent" scanning is/was an included feature. A volunteer offered to work on the filter driver a month or so ago--don't know what the status is. Perhaps Alch/Sherpya will fill us in soon.

You can't compare ClamWin to Norton and other AVs that employ a full-time, paid staff of hundreds (maybe thousands) of people. The developer(s) have done pretty good to get it to this point (thanks to the consistently-developed Clam AV engine and signature database). If you would like to help it get to the next level, please contact Alch or Sherpya via the Contact Us link on the ClamWin home page. C+ skills are needed.

Clam AV is developing some good features but it is for use on Linux machines. They already have phishing heuristics, some built-in generic malware "family" signatures, malware statistics generated from users, and a minimal scanning disassembler. They will have some heuristics at some point between Clam AV version .95 and 1.0. I hope ClamWin can keep up.

Regards,