I just did a full scan with Windows Defender, and it took nearly 2.5 hours, even though I don't have much installed on my laptop. I've got about 50.2 GB free out of 177 GB on the drive, and there are just a few Word and Excel documents. The programs I have installed are Microsoft Office, Anaconda, and CCleaner. So, I'm wondering why it takes so long to complete a scan when my storage seems clean.
1 Answer
It sounds like your scan is taking longer possibly because of your drive type and the specs of your laptop. Even if you don't have a lot of data, older or lower-quality drives can slow down scanning significantly since they're not able to read files as quickly. So, it's not just about how much storage you have left, but also how efficient your hardware is during the scanning process.
Is this a concern for my laptop? I mean, I have an AMD Ryzen 5 processor with 16GB of RAM. Does that affect the scan time?