Hi, I am new to this forum and immediately start with a question.
I prepared an old 10" notebook (Pentium 3 with 700 MHz and 192 Mbyte RAM and Win XP) for a friend's daughter. It runs quite nicely, even for surfing, as long as there is no realtime Antivirus program (MS Essential) is installed.
I have installed CLAMWIN but it seems to take ages to scan.
My question:
How long would it approximately take to scan e.g.
a 1 GB usb stick with 10 Mbyte data (several files)?
or
a 500 Kbyte file on the harddisk?
Thank you.

PS
Yes, I read FAQ and used the Search but did not find anything useful.

Welcome to ClamWin!

ClamWin takes about a minute and a half to scan my 8 gigabyte USB stick that has 584 megabytes of files on it. I have it configured to only scan for about 20 file extensions commonly used by malware, so if you don't have any filters like that, it would take much longer since it scans all files by default. I also use Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE)--configured to exclude ClamWin's data folder (which contains the ClamWin signatures & quarantine files), so I'm not taking too much of a chance of missing anything, as MSE scans many more extensions. If I did not use MSE also, I would scan for about 30 extensions in total, which I figure would give me about 95% coverage of the malware I would possibly encounter. Some users might argue with what I'm dong, but it is based on my experience of almost 5 years of working malware signatures for Clam AV. You can Google for a list of common malware extensions. My list includes: exe, dll, js, htm, html, eml, zip, swf, tmp, inf, pdf, scr, class, doc, sys, ocx, vbs, bin, bat, Lnk, and pif. ClamWin will scan all extensions when you do a manual scan of a file.

Scanning also depends upon the type of file and what it contains. Zipped files will take longer because ClamWin must unzip them. Some malware files will have lots of "junk" in them to confound AV scanners, and these will take longer to scan also.

Regards,

My laptop is only 2gb and I tried to run clamwin scan and it took me almost two hours. I wonder why?

In addition to the two factors GuitarBob already mentioned above, CPU speed, amount of RAM installed, and number of background running processes will also affect scan times.

Thank you for your replies, specially to GuitarBoy for your recommendation of file extensions.
My ClamWin works now and there seems to be a minimum time not dependend on file size or numbers.
GuitarBoy, you didn't mention the specs of your computer, so may be it is far more powerful.
But I'm quite happy now to know that I can scan usb sticks.

Most viruses infect these folders: Windows/System 32, Users/primary user/Appdata--Vista & newer) or Documents & Settings/primary user--Windows XP and older, and Programs. You will not find many elsewhere. I suggest you scan your C:\ drive once a week and the other folders daily. Also just scan for those commonly-used extensions listed above.

Regards,