Scanning for viruses on your computer

Scanning is one of the important parts of protecting your computer from viruses. Active Virus Shield can scan individual items, such as files, folders, disks, plug-and-play devices, for viruses or can scan the entire computer. Scanning for viruses helps prevent malicious code, that has escaped detected by protection, from spreading.
Active Virus Shield includes three default scan tasks.
Critical Regions

This task scans all critical areas of the computer for viruses. This critical areas that are scanned include: system memory, programs loaded on startup, boot sectors on the hard drive, and the Windows and system32 system directories. The goal of this scan is to quickly detect active viruses in the system without fully scanning the computer.

My Computer

This scan searches for viruses on your entire computer with a thorough scan of all disk drives, memory, and files.

Auto Launch Program

This scan searches all programs that are loaded when the operating system boots up for viruses.

The default settings for these tasks are the recommended ones. You can edit these settings or create a schedule for running tasks.
You also have the option of creating virus scan tasks and creating a schedule for each task. For example, you can create a task to scan the mail databases once per week or a task to scan the My Documents folder.
In addition, you can scan any object for viruses (for example, the hard drive where programs and games are stored, e-mail databases that you've brought home from work, an archive attached to an e-mail, etc.) without creating a special scan task. You can select an object to scan from the Active Virus Shield interface or with the standard tools of the Windows operating system (for example, in the Explorer program window or on your Desktop, etc.).
You can view a complete list of virus scan tasks for your computer in the Virus scan section in the left portion of the main program window.
Also see:
Virus scan task status
Managing virus scan tasks
Creating a list of objects to scan
Creating virus scan tasks
Configuring virus scan tasks
Virus scan statistics