Is startup scan actually necessary?

[denzilla 0]

There is quite a bit of a performance hit when cold booting PCs with traditional HDDs due to Startup scan. If the resident real-time scanner is doing its job, isn't the startup scan redundant?

[Marcos 5,731]

Yes, it's necessary. Unlike real-time protection startup scans scan also operating memory as well as startup locations, including WMI and registry. However, they should not have a noticeable effect on system performance.

What is the hw configuration of the pc in question? Does uninstalling ESET installing it from scratch with default settings (with LiveGrid enabled) make a difference?

[itman 1,921]

15 hours ago, denzilla said:

There is quite a bit of a performance hit when cold booting PCs with traditional HDDs due to Startup scan.

My boot drive is a SATA III; i,e. 6 Gb/s, plus my motherboard and CPU are 12 years old. I have no performance impact due to Eset startup scan. Also, it only runs for 10 - 15 secs at most.

Edited March 20, 2021 by itman

[denzilla 0]

Weird. It goes on for a few minutes on all our machines and the HDD churns. No performance impact on an SSD equipped machine. Admittedly, this could also be a combination of other processes fighting for I/O as the machine finishes boot.

My post was more curiosity about the actual need for startup scan though. 

HW configs vary from 4th gen i5's with 8GB ram and up. Most have spinning rust. All Win10 Pro 64-bit.

@Marcos So real-time scanner doesn't actively monitor those locations while the PC is running?

 

Edited March 21, 2021 by denzilla

[Marcos 5,731]

Real-time protection scans files. It doesn't scan locations where fileless malware is stored.

[denzilla 0]

Thanks for the clarification!