The cure for Antivirus

I had reason to check my PC for viruses and other threats today. Apart from the fact that I now know that my PC has 550,000 or so different files on it across two hard disks, it took an hour and a quarter.

In the same manner that software backup is perceived as boring, checking your PC for viruses and spyware now takes longer and longer. Accordingly, many users choose not to perform regular checks. To be fair, users who re-format or re-image their machines regularly for performance reasons may view the scans as unnecessary. Every good Antivirus program, whether retail or free, carries the option to set a default scheduled time for virus checks, but, in the case of Symantec, Friday night at 8pm is hardly ideal. Personally, I'd be in the pub or cinema.

If I had lots of music files on my machine I would expect it to take a long time, but I wasn't expecting 75 minutes for a Vista installation that had the grand total of one game installed on top of its average 15Gb partition size, and a Windows XP installation on the other hard disk from a failed dual boot.

The option I believed to be the answer - to only install one game at a time, and minimize the music - hasn't worked. It's not about Vista per se, but I will certainly back up the computer with an image file and go back to XP for as long as I can get away with it, if I get the feeling that Vista's not sitting well on my two-year-old PC.