I was recently talking to a co-worker who was complaining that their machine ran a virus scan every Wednesday at noon, and made the machine totally unusable. Of course, the virus scanner was our corporate version of Symantec and the scan cannot be disabled. Which in my mind, brings up an interesting question:
If the antivirus “Auto-Protect” feature actually works, why the heck do you need to run a virus scan??!
Seriously. And, a lot of helpdesk documentation on the web recommends that users run virus scans weekly/daily. But at the same time, if you have the autoprotect working, then theoretically isn’t it going to stop anything from getting onto your machine, and thus making the virus scan useless?
It used to be that running a virus scan wouldn’t kill the machine, but with todays bloated and slow antivirus products, it just seems silly to run the scan. But maybe thats just me.