Real World Computing

This post is going to be an easy read because I don't have any time to update the blog at the moment - so just look at the pictures. Most people who've spent any time with me on the computer know that I hate anti-virus products because I think that they spend too much time slowing down the system without any guarantee of actually fixing the problem. Here's an example which just happened about five minutes ago. I received an email containing an obviously bad file. It passed neatly through our external scanning system which consists of SEVERAL different anti-virus and anti-spam filters. I knew it would be a virus, so I saved it to my hard drive. You can see that it has a Microsoft Word icon but that it ends in .EXE. If you accept the windows default to hide extensions for known file types, you'll never see the EXE and you might even be fooled into thinking that _doc is the same as .doc. So... I right clicked on the file and chose scan from the context menu. As mentioned ...

(warning... this is rant - I know you're not supposed to blog about things when you're irritated but I've been irritated with McAfee for ages and it's not going away). My irritation with McAfee's Anti-Malware technologies has slowly been building for the past six months. For a start, I find myself disabling their firewall more often than I leave it enabled. The thing constantly tries to chew up 90+ percent of my systems resources. What's the point of having security software if, for usability reasons, you have to constantly turn it off? Whenever I start Lotus Notes 8.0.2, I have to remember to stop the McShield service (from the services part of control panel) before I double-click the icon. If I forget, my PC slows to a crawl and I can make filtered coffee and still get back with plenty of hourglass watching time. It would be easy to blame Notes for this but it performs so well when McAfee is off. In addition, several of my other bits of software perform mu...

Ok, before everyone starts jumping on me for this, I'm talking about the need for our individual PCs to be processing this sort of stuff. Recent Issues - Scanning I've been finding myself increasingly turning McAfee's services off in order to do simple tasks without massive interference. It's a well known and demonstrated fact that applications which use a lot of small files, like the new version of the Notes client (the Eclipse version) do not run happily with Anti-Virus. Why? Because everytime they pick up a file to execute it, the Anti-Virus app "snatches it off them for a look". In the days of large applications, the anti-virus would simply scan a massive EXE file once and then move on. That's no longer the case. Last Friday, I was trying to download some things from the IBM site using their "Download Director" facility. McAfee seized the Java applet and took so long to scan it that it kept timing out. In the end, the only way I could dow...