In many instances of instrument and processing stations being connected to the internet, I’ve helped individuals having system lock up issues on various mass spec systems over the past 20 years, when using Real-Time Virus Scanning Protection.

This issue is vendor agnostic and will causes problems in data collection and processing on a number of vendor platforms.

If you have Norton, McAfee, Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender, etc and you need to run real-time virus protection. You should exclude the folders where data is actively being collected and processed. This will ensure that any processes, such as instrument communication, raw data writing to disk or processed result file creation,aren’t being interrupted by virus checking during data collection and manipulation.

Below is a list of folders recommended for exclusion in the various anti-virus programs.

The example comes from Windows Defender in Windows 10, and will have a different user interface dependent on what application you are using, however each application available commercially today has this capability.

1:Real-time protection is on and select settings

2: Select Add an Exclusion

3: Add each of these folders as an exclusion