My anti virus program has spent 20 min scanning a 1 gb executable file and still going. Is this too long?

Question

It is supposedly a good quality one that can scan compressed images for viruses and I think the image is compressed.

How long should I leave it before assuming the program is stuck/malfunctioning?

Answer 1

Hum? Something doesn't sound right here. You didn't say whether this image file is a file you downloaded or not. If you downloaded it then it sounds fishy to me. I have been working on computers for years and the only time i ever saw a file that size labeled as a image, What it really was, It was a big bad virus that at the time my free AV couldn't detect much less delete. You need to check this file out. See if you can open it. Personally' If it turned out to be something i did want to keep, I would move it. Get it off my hard drive and put it on a external drive or thumb drive. A file that big will slow your computer down. If it's a virus, That big, Your on your way to reloading your OS somewhere down the line.

Answer 2

By "image" you mean an ISO file or similar? You can use 7-Zip to look inside the ISO image

I would say that 20 minutes is not too long to wait as an anti virus deep scan can be an overnight job.



Note that the progress bar on your scanner will only advance when the whole archive has been scanned. The individual files inside a ZIP or ISO file are not counted as completed. So it might appear that nothing is happening for 20 minutes or more when in fact the scanner is very busy.

Answer 3

Think about all of the files and how much is in your computer that is to be scanned.



Some anti viruses run for 2 - 3 hours.



Let it do its job.

Answer 4

Nope. it could last up to like 3 hours or something like that if you're running a deep scan.



you can always check if it's still working by opening the task manager.

Answer 5

How in the world did you find a 1GB image file? And tis compressed as well? Biggest compressed image file I got was like less than 5MB but 1GB, damn!....

Answer 6

particular that's according to how plenty stuff is on your harddrive...and how many harddrives you have on your equipment. in case you have alot of courses/folders/data/%....what have ya...this is going to take a collectively as to end a test.

Answer 7

Maybe just let it run overnight?

Answer 8

thats normal