Entire hard drive scanning speed

[robertdev]

Is there a way to get SpyBot S&D to scan one's entire hard drive? I have set the default download file in the settings to my C: drive to do just that, but the scan was going on its 5th hour, so I aborted the scan. However, the scan completed the scan for the current 156787 bugs in just over 20 minutes. After that I was left looking at the bottom line saying "156787/156787 Please wait while scanning directories..." for the remainder of the time the scan was running, with no other indication of how far along it was in its scan of my hard drive.

The computer in question is a newer laptop with a Centrino core 2 duo processor T5450 at 1.67GHz, Vista running on 2 gigs system memory and a 200 gig hard drive that only has 20 gigs of stuff on it. I made sure the laptop was running on AC before starting the scan and made sure all power saving features were disabled. I also disabled AdAware's service and AVG's services along with Windoze Defender.

Is there a known amount of time the scanner will take for a given amount of data on a hard drive?

[drragostea]

It seems that Spybot will report the scanning time after the completion of the scan.

Are you running any other programs during the scan? Spybot should complete in a short amount of time with such a processor.

Have you defragmented your drive lately? Have you cleared the cache, temp. files, and cookies from your browsers?

[Greyfox]

I have set the default download file in the settings to my C: drive to do just that, but the scan was going on its 5th hour, so I aborted the scan

Robert,

The download directory was never intended to be used the way you have used it. It is intended to allow for your download folder (the one you use for all downloads like a quarantine folder) to be added to it so that data you have downloaded gets special attention in the scan. There are many types of files, folders and other items that Malware etc cannot operate from so there is no point scanning them. If you put your entire C: drive in there, then you can expect a very long scan time, if indeed it ever finishes the task.