Though we can call this time variance 'speculation', it's quite obviously the
reason, since by design and default an update occurs just before the daily
scan. Since this is set to the same time for all copies of Defender, what do
you think would happen if several million individual home PCs all started at
excactly the same time?
Even when the user has changed the time to a different hour, it would still
create too much traffic for even the massive Windows Update system to
accomodate.
There were discussions that the update timing should be separated from the
scan time, run randomly in the hour before the scan is scheduled for example,
but this still leaves the issue of possibly thousands of systems reporting to
Spynet in the same few minutes due to the similar timing of several minutes
to complete a Quick Scan.
I'm guessing that this timing wasn't considered a high priority on the
changelist. I think it's interesting that only a handful have ever even
noticed this, in fact most aren't even aware that the scans are scheduled at
night by default.
Bitman
Dave M said:
Hi Robin;
The scan time is approximate, and Ms was going to make that clear in the
help files. We've seen variations of as much as slightly under an hour +
or - throughout the Beta. Speculation is that this was built in to
accommodate corporate interests, in that a definition update associated
with a scan occurring for hundreds of people all at once on a managed
network would overly tax the organization's internet connection. Of
course, you can always schedule a replacement MP Scheduled Scan task
yourself from within Task Scheduler and it will be exact, if that's what
you need to happen.
M not 3min prior?