I’ve been using Security Essentials for awhile on several of my home PC’s. It seems to be pretty solid, and seems to be catching any issues. My problem, however, is that it seems like it’s slowing the machine down a lot. It doesn’t seem to be using a lot of memory, and it doesn’t seem like it’s tying up the CPU. What it’s doing, I think, is slowing down file access quite a bit, effectively making everything slow to start and load. Shutting off the real-time protection made a drastic improvement on performance.
So, ever eager to find a better solution to a problem, I removed MSE and installed the latest version of Avast. So far it seems to be much less of a drag on the system than MSE. Whether it will catch all problems remains to be seen.
I worked on a laptop for someone a couple weeks ago that had a nasty virus. Her initial complaint was that her wireless wouldn’t connect to the WAP. As I was fixing that, I was told that her automatic updates also weren’t running. I checked, and sure enough, that service was disabled. I enabled it and started it up, and launched Windows Update. After a few minutes, it complained that the service wasn’t running. Yep, it was stopped and disabled again. Obviously an infection of some sort, so I pulled out my flash drive with my various cleaning tools.
Well, apparently Vundu knows about Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware, SpyBot Search and Destroy, AVG, and just about anything else I tried to throw at it. It effectively blocked every attempt to install or run any of those programs. I decided to run the AVG Boot Recovery from USB drive. It ran for the better half of a day, and DID clean some viruses off the computer. Unfortunately, after booting back up, Vundu was back just as strong as before.
After talking to a few fellow tech guys, one suggested that he had seen this problem before. He advised to go ahead and run the Malwarebytes install, and then to copy a good version of the .exe file into the program’s directory. Vundu was blocking that file from being installed by the setup program. After doing that, Malwarebytes was able to clean Vundu successfully. After a few more runs of that program and some others, plus CCleaner to clean up any messes left over and a defrag for fun, the laptop was as good as new.
Malwarebytes is my new friend. Highly recommended if you need to clean up an infection.
Well, turns out the wireless problem was hardware. Dell sent out a new card and all has been good since. The replacement also upgraded me to support 802.11n, so if I ever encounter a N-capable AP, I’ll be set. The only thing that concerns me is that my laptop only had 2 internal antennas to hook to the card, and the card had 3 ports.
Looks like I was wrong. Even though I had a long period of no problems with my wireless adapter last night, today I had another lockup. Disable, enable, it finds the AP, gets an IP, and we’re back online. Sounds like we’ll be calling Dell support Monday morning to see what they have to say.
I’ve got a Dell Latitude D630 with built-in Intel wireless. Recently I installed Cygwin/X, as I wanted an X server to use. I ended up not using it, as it wasn’t working like I expected, but hadn’t gotten around to uninstalling it.
About the same time, I started having problems with my wireless adapter. It would drop connection and not see any available access points. Turning it off and on with the switch on the laptop didn’t make a difference. However, disabling and enabling under Network Connections would fix it for awhile.
Anyway, I didn’t connect the two things in my head at first, mainly because it didn’t seem likely that one would have any affect on the other. I assumed I had a hardware problem, so I asked the IT guys at work to re-seat my wireless card. When that didn’t make a difference, I started checking my drivers and such to make sure everything was up to date. I ran all my Windows updates and installed a few new Dell releases. Still no change.
When I thought about it some more, I realized the problem had started about the time Cygwin was installed. I had been wanting to remove it anyway, so I figured it was worth a shot. I was a little surprised to find that Cygwin doesn’t have an uninstall program. Instead I had to manually remove the program folder. Kinda cheesy if you ask me.
Amazingly enough, since then I’ve had no problems. In fact, I’ve been on the wireless for at least 4 hours straight this evening without a hitch. At this point I’m assuming the Cygwin was the culprit. I’ll post a status update in a few days to confirm.
I wrote a quick article a couple days ago about the Avast meltdown, which caused me no small amount of stress, not only from thinking my kids had gotten one of the computers on my network infected, but also from having to go back and clean up after the mess it caused. Essentially it started [...]
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I know someone “in the business”, so to speak, that pretty much refuses to do PC work. He’s sharp, he’s technical – there’s no doubt he could handle it if he put his mind to it – but he’d just rather not start. I can understand why. There have been so many different iterations of [...]
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Viruses, spyware, adware, rootkits, etc…, they’ve been around for years now and they’re worse all the time. With the relatively low cost of PC’s these days, it’s not uncommon to see articles talking about how it’s cheaper to just get a new PC than to have one cleaned up or repaired. Myself, I’m not big [...]
