Re: [OM] OT - question re anti-virus program

[Chuck Norcutt]

I can't tell you about the present products but I gave up on McAfee and 
Norton Antivirus products about 4 years ago.  Slowness was one of their 
more desirable features.  :-)

I've been using AVG for the last couple of years but it too seems to be 
becoming more intrusive.  My computer is almost unusable for the first 2 
or 3 minutes after the first boot of the day because AVG is churning the 
disk mercilessly.  I have no idea what it's doing but it does hundreds 
of thousands of I/O operations in a short period of time.  It then goes 
quiet but wakes up at odd moments a couple of times/day for a few 
seconds of thrash the disk.  When it finally comes time to do a virus 
scan for the day it's so resource intensive that the computer is nearly 
unusable even after I click its lower priority switch.  I've given to 
giving it a start time after I've gone to bed and let it shut down the 
machine afterwards.  Since I can do other things for the first few 
minutes after the morning boot and can sleep while it's doing the virus 
scan none of these shenanigans have caused me to think seriously yet 
about replacing it but it could be getting to that point.  I just wish I 
knew exactly what it was doing and why.

Chuck Norcutt


John Hudson wrote:
> Please excuse this OT question but I am sure somebody will have a quick and 
> short answer.
> 
> Does the McAfee anti-virus / utility / anti-spam package have a reputation 
> for slowing down one's computer when being run in "background and always 
> alert" mode? On the assumption that all such software causes some degree of 
> slowdown is McAfee worse than the competition?
> 
> Our daughter has recently taken out a 30 day subscription to the McAfee 
> package and tells me that her computer has really started to slow down 
> making her feel that McAfee is churning in the background and slowing up the 
> works.
> 
> jh 
-- 
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/