Using ClamXAV

Q: Can I scan my entire hard drive?

Absolutely! It will already be listed in your Source List. Just select it and press the Scan Now button, as if it were any other file or folder.

Q: Why is the scan taking so long?

A scan of your entire hard drive shouldn’t take more than an hour or so (it may take longer if you have a large amount of data on the drive).

If it’s taking considerably longer than that, please check that you’re not scanning your Time Machine/Time Capsule backup disk. This will simply take too long and provides only minimal protection as it’s not actually possible to remove any malware that ClamXAV finds on a Time Machine/Time Capsule disk – the only software that can modify one of those backups is Apple’s Time Machine software itself.

The best thing to do is to scan your hard drive now, to remove any malware which might currently be present, and any infected files in your backups will simply get deleted in due course as your backup disk runs out of space.

Q: Will other anti-virus scanners cause conflicts with ClamXAV?

Some incompatibilities have been reported with other anti-virus products so we’d always recommend having only one on your Mac at any one time.

Q: I’ve got a suspicious file but ClamXAV didn’t find any malware– what do I do?

Please send us your suspicious file and we’ll check it out for you. And equally, if you’ve got a file that you KNOW has malware and wasn’t picked up by us, send us that suspicious file too and we’ll sort it out as soon as possible.

Q: ClamXAV picked up a virus in my Word documents– what do I do?

Although one way to remove the infection is simply to delete the infected file, this isn’t always feasible and may not actually solve the problem anyway. Our advice is:

1. Quit all your Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage etc) and delete Word’s Normal file (which you’ll find in Home Folder/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Normal).
2. Empty the trash and open up Word again.
3. Go to Word Menu/Preferences/Security and put a tick in the box under Macro Security.
4. Open each of your infected Word documents in turn and click Disable Macros when the warning comes up.
5. Then copy and paste the contents into a new document and delete the original.

Q: How to I deal with malware on my computer?

Our Dealing with Malware guide gives a step-by-step of how to remove malware from your computer.

Q: Why is “clamd” using so much RAM?

Please see clamd is using a lot of RAM