• We hope you have a fantastic holiday season to close out 2025! Thank you all so much for being part of the Tom's Guide community!

Antivirus and antimalware scanning for too long

NoPuhi

Estimable
Jan 26, 2016
15
0
4,560
So i just ran a malwarebytes scan on a laptop that my family uses. The laptop ran AVAST as security but i decided to install malwarebytes and BitDefender instead, since i had bad experiences with the free version of AVAST.
I tried to run the bitdefender manual scan first, but it just looked that it was stuck on scanning C:/
and doing nothing. I disabled that and ran a full malwarebytes scan. It has been running, and still is, for 4 and a half hours. the funny thing is that the laptop only has 309GB memory occupied. when i run malwarebytes on my PC it usually takes 45mins to perform a scan and i have around 700gb, if not more, occupied. does anyone have any idea whats going on here? The laptop does run a bit slow, but nothing extreme.
 
Solution
If it's a 1st time run and it seems it is, it can take a while. Maybe give it overnight. Of course if there's something evil lurking on the machine, that's another story... But give Malwarebytes/BitDefender more time first?
If it's a 1st time run and it seems it is, it can take a while. Maybe give it overnight. Of course if there's something evil lurking on the machine, that's another story... But give Malwarebytes/BitDefender more time first?
 
Solution