If you’re like me, you don’t think about desktop maintenance for your home computer (like system backups, defragmenting the disk, etc.). One system maintenance activity I do regularly, however, is antivirus scans. To be honest, I only do those because the clever software vendor designed the application to automatically do a virus scan on a weekly basis when installed.
I noticed my antivirus scans taking longer and longer to run. Then I found this little gem on ZDNet: Antivirus Software and Disk Defragmentation. The white paper is written by a company that produces and sells Diskeeper – and application that handles file and free space fragmentation on your desktop. It describes how the company conducted research with 4 popular anti-virus scan applications, including Symantec Antivirus 2003, McAfee Pro 7.02, Trend Micro PC-cillin 10.03, and Panda Titanium Antivirus 2004.
The results? Run-time of the anti-virus scan improved 20% - 55% on systems that were defrag’d, lowering scan times by 17-58 minutes. Neat!
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