Sophos Free Mac Home

That might be a bit overkill for starters.

If you have archive scanning turned on and not much free space left / not much available RAM, you're going to get the beach ball as data gets swapped on and off the hard disk.

First thing I'd do is install AppleJack, restart the computer in single user mode, and run the tools as prompted at the menu.  This will fix any disk errors, clean up preference files, fix disk permissions, purge possibly corrupt cache files, and a few other things.

Next reboot normally and create a custom scan of a limited portion of your drive.  Run that scan with archive scanning enabled.

You might want to exclude certain archives from your scan, and then do a local file scan.

After such a scan finally completes, you won't be doing many more manual scans, as the on-access scan component will scan files as they're modified on-disk.

That might be a bit overkill for starters.

If you have archive scanning turned on and not much free space left / not much available RAM, you're going to get the beach ball as data gets swapped on and off the hard disk.

First thing I'd do is install AppleJack, restart the computer in single user mode, and run the tools as prompted at the menu.  This will fix any disk errors, clean up preference files, fix disk permissions, purge possibly corrupt cache files, and a few other things.

Next reboot normally and create a custom scan of a limited portion of your drive.  Run that scan with archive scanning enabled.

You might want to exclude certain archives from your scan, and then do a local file scan.

After such a scan finally completes, you won't be doing many more manual scans, as the on-access scan component will scan files as they're modified on-disk.