Like when my AVG anti-virus does a complete scan, it doesn’t give an estimate as to how long it’ll take. (When the job’s done, AVG gives you the start and stop times, if you care to look.)
Neither does Microsoft’s Defrag and many other such programs—I think.
Why not, especially when you’ve used the software for awhile, and the program’s “learned” how big your hard drive is, what’s installed on the disc?
It hasn’t learned how fragmented the drive is, or how many system resources are being used at start up, or how many system resources will be used at some point during the scan, or how many new files you have on your hard drive, or…
Because for the most part, predicting the duration of operations that involve working on a lot of files is damn near impossible at the outset, and for the most part, the values given for most such apps are wildly inaccurate. The main reason for this is that programs like antivirus applications that scan every file on your system have no idea of how large or small the files it will be scanning are. File size will effect how long a scan will take. So will scanning inside of archived files (if that option is checked), overall system fragmentation, and amount of CPU time it has at any given moment to perform its functions (which can fluctuate wildly as you use your PC). The estimated time is just that – estimated. The prorgam will revise the time remaining as it goes by averaging the file sizes one after the other, but while the figure will eventually get more and more accurate, it will never be precise.
I don’t know why AVG doesn’t give you an estimate, but it’s possible it might just be because anything it does give you will be a rough guess at best.
What Mindfield said with an additional point; adding features isn’t easy. They need to pull someone off something else in order to add the feature, make sure it’s well tested, and make sure it doesn’t slow anything down as a result of the new calculations. The benefits of that feature are relatively small…you get a wildly inaccurate estimate of how long it’s going to take in exchange for many hours of dev time.
Thank you, folks.