Les Jones: That Was Weird

October 14, 2007

Tech > That Was Weird

I've been effectively offline most of the weekend. My computer starting acting goofy - running really slowly. This, coincidentally, after my McAfee subscription expired on Monday. I was playing around with a free anti-virus solution that seemed OK. Things got really slow Thursday or Friday.

By Saturday morning I couldn't take it anymore and downloaded AdAware. I ran it three times and it conked out three times. Finally I renewed McAfee, re-installed it, did a couple of reboots, had my wireless Internet connection disappear, and had a couple of forced chkdisks on an external drive in the midst of all that.

Now everything is suddenly back to normal. McAfee never reported finding or fixing anything. Weird. I'm going to run AdWare and Microsoft Windows Defender again to see if they find anything.

Posted by lesjones | TrackBack

Comments

I think the problem with AVG is that its default settings are designed to slow down your computer. I think it sets itself up to run whenever it thinks there is free time. Unfortunately, that seems to be every five minutes.

I make sure to only scan files manually (no "auto-scan" or background processes).

Posted by: Alcibiades McZombie at October 15, 2007

I've been using Iobit's Advanced Windows Care for the last couple of months. I put it on the wife's computer after she insisted on moving from W2K to XP(spit). It found a lot of garbage that was junking up the registry, cleaned out all the spyware, of which there was a lot (her damned kid uses her computer)and uncluttered all the old junky leftovers from updates Windows left behind.

Not only did it speed things up considerably, it doesn't crash or hang anymore. Rabbit approved. It's also freeware.

www.iobit.com

Regards,
Rabbit.

Posted by: Rabbit at October 15, 2007

Hmm, this makes 5 computers i know of, including my own.

The symptoms are that the computers run fine until the Mcafee subscription runs out, then everything slows down, freezes up, etc.

Once Mcafee is either removed or renewed the problem goes away immediately.

I find this troubling.

Posted by: Jak at October 15, 2007

Alcibiades: I didn't realize AVG ran in the background, but I checked and you're right - it's running right now. Computer's running fine now, though, so I don't think that's it. I'm amazed it tries to run every day - the first time I used it it took like two days to scan my entire computer.

Rabbit: thanks. I'm downloading Advanced Windows Care right now.

Jak: yeah, it was enough to get me to renew. Was McAfee preventing those problems before it expired? I dunno. Maybe. But it never said it had found any problems. Even after I renewed it and the problems went away it never said it found a problem. I dunno.

Posted by: Les Jones at October 15, 2007

NEVER have two anti-virus programs on your computer at once. Even if one is "expired." They will fight one another in the background and generally hose the works. They each see the other as a security threat, and rightfully so.

AVG is fine. McAfee I would not have. The best free for home use is Avast.

Posted by: swanky at October 15, 2007

McAfee and AOL are, IMHO, virus-like in the way that they creep into a system. I kill both instantly, including going through Program Files and C:\Windows manually to delete effing everything.

I've used AVG Pro along with the free version, and the free version works just fine. AVG wasn't the problem, it was the McAfee on your system.

If you 'need' to have a paid-for anti-virus, then NOD32 is good, although really and truly AVG works on both my 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

Posted by: Peter at October 16, 2007