I have Ad-Aware Plus AE and when I do a Full Scan, my PC basically becomes almost unusable.
Pages are slow to load, opening programmes takes forever, I type and the letters appear seconds later.......
It also takes ages, well over an hour.

Is there anything I can do to improve this (apart from not doing a Full Scan) ?.

Best thing to do is let it scan when you're not using the computer, like when you're at dinner or watching TV. I unplug from the internet and stop all other processes, and it still takes ~ 2 hrs to scan my 80 gb HD with a 2.4 gHz processor. Also, clear your browser cache and temp files so there's not as much to scan.

I have the same problem!! I'm up to 5 and a half hours now and still scanning. I'm not using the computer, using laptop instead until it's finished lol. I don't think I'll be doing a full scan again in a hurry!!

One other thing - under Scan Settings, you can select "Skip files larger than ----- KB"
Default is 20480 KB (20mb). If you have a lot of music or video files, you can lower this to 5-10mb to lower the number of items scanned. Malware tends to be small in size since they're not complex and in the hopes they'll go undetected.

Thanks for that. After 6 hours (phew!) the scan finished and detected no malware. I'll try what you suggested when I can summon up the stamina to do a full scan again lol