How often do you run a Virus Scan?

[The Undoer]

I used to scan once a day, but now I use Avast, which works on Real Time Security, I only scan when I think my computer is acting up.

 

[Silva]

Once every day, as soon as my computer considers itself idle.

I have AVG Free Edition. That scans every Saturday night, and the thing's always clean.

With an i7 2.6 GHz processor running Windows 7 x64, so yeah, I don't even notice it scanning 'till it's done.

While running Crysis.

Scanning your HDD is mostly about HDD I/O, not your other specs.
You'll scan much faster on a 2GHz P4 with an SSD than any i7 system with an HDD.

Which is why it's great that I have a very good HDD. Like Calatar said, having an i7 is always better than having a P4 2 GHz, assuming the HDD specifications are high enough. In my case, both specs are higher, so there's no issue here.

Anyway, what mattered to me when I said that was that I can play high-end games and do many other things without being slowed down or generally having performance effected while the HD is being scanned. Which is pretty good, because I have a good 482 GB of data (which is 48% of available space) on this thing already, and the amount of data would make the wait for the scan to finish excruciating (if it didn't take less than 10 minutes as it does right now, somehow).

Though, that might tell you more of my experience, right up until last year, of a 1.5 GHz processor from the P3 era, than it does about the efforts of current-generation PC users to speed up their equipment even more.