Excluding digital camera transfer folders from antivirus scan list boosts performance

Recently, I removed McAfee and Spybot and installed Microsoft Security Essentials and my computer performance seems to have improved.  But I am always looking for other ways to improve its speed and I found this article on excluding "known good" folders from your antivirus scan list to speed up computer performance helpful.  I took this article's advice and excluded the folder where I transfer images from my digital camera since I know they are virus-free and take up gigabytes of disk space.

It also recommended excluding folders containing music files as long as you are obtaining your music files from a reliable source like Amazon, iTunes, or Audible.com.  I have an Audible subscription and download large audio book files from them every month so I guess I should exclude those as well.


The article points out that you should always exclude by file folder rather than by file type or file name.  As long as you keep files from particular sources (like your digital camera) in their own folder that is kept separate from folders with downloaded files from the internet, it works quite well.

Related articles

• Microsoft vs. McAfee: How free antivirus outperformed paid (kansasdad.blogspot.com)
• Monitor Folders for any changes, additions, deletions with Folder Spy (madrasgeek.com)