A quick scan completed on my laptop in two minutes, but I know a full scan takes more than an hour. With 10 devices or less you should be able to easily determine if it's better to schedule a quick scan or full scan. Choosing a scanning day other than those has a higher chance of running due to the user being in the office and the computer on. Mondays and Fridays are most often taken off for vacation to make long weekends. Depending on what your users do with their computers during lunch, you might want to consider setting the time to 12:00 PM.Ī setting of Tuesday would be a good choice for the day. Therefore, they settled on noon as a good time to start the scan. Our security folks found that most users go to lunch at noon and merely lock their screens rather than shutdown or put their computers to sleep.

Where I work the security team has configured our anti-virus program to start a quick scan at noon once a week and a full scan at noon once a month. In Security Essentials you can adjust the schedule by opening the program, going to the Settings tab, choose Scheduled Scan on the left, then adjust the parameters as necessary.

Configure Security Essentials to scan the computer when you are confident that it will be on.

Microsoft essentials windows 7