Does deleting temp files make it faster to scan for viruses?

Question

I have some viruses in my computer. I was scanning it and it took forever. Like, more than an hour. If I do a disk clean up will it make it faster to scan for viruses? And also, is it safe to delete all the files in the temp folder?

Answer 1

Not really. The size of temporary files is very small. Max 5 mb . It won't make much of a difference of the the time taken for a virus scan to be completed

Answer 2

you can delete all the files in the temp folder unless you know that there is a temp file that is imprtant to you.

Answer 3

Deleteing the temporary folder is not going to make a huge difference. But doing a disk cleanup should speed up the process.

Answer 4

It is a myth that cleaning out the temp files will speed up a computer.... by doing so, you are freeing up some space on the hard drive, but only because you are telling the system that the space on the hard drive filled with the temp files is available to be written over..they are still on the hard drive, you just deleted the pointer telling your system to go there for the files .... but that doesn't do any good unless you then defrag the system.....by defragging the system, you are now  putting that space to use and making other space available for the computer to write to......

The speed of an AV check of your system depends on how big your hard drive is, whether you are running a full all files scan or just doing the slightly quicker fast scan/quick scan feature of your AV program......

Absolutely helps your computer to clean out the trashy files in the temp file folder and the temp internet file folder.... but then you need to follow that up with a defrag... preferably not the stock Windows defrag, but with a more thorough defrag like JKDefrag or a couple of other 3rd party free defrag programs. windows defrag is notoriously slow and notoriously misses quite a bit of files.....

But an AV scan will be qickest if done in Safe Mode, and whatever the quicker scan is that your program has.... although a full all files scan is better and more thorough... but is quicker in Safe Mode.......

Answer 5

Yes if you tell the virus scanner to scan every file.

No if you have it setup to only scan files that can be effected with a virus (exe,com,bat and so on.

What temp folder are you talking about? you web brower or the windows/temp/ folder?

If it's the browser it would be 100% safe, if its the windows temp it would be safe but i wouldn't say it's 100%.

Answer 6

Yes, deleting almost anything will make it faster. Less files to scan = faster

Answer 7

Running disk clean up before will speed things up.