We have one office rig running Win 7 Pro that has MS Security Essentials on it (the MS antivirus program, which in some surveys has received a rating of 4 out of 10 for effectiveness), though that was a decision by the outfit that built it. I suddenly and uncharacteristically had a rather bad experience yesterday, in the process of trying to do some updates on it. I noticed that everything was running slowly, which can be a indicator of trouble. (This rig is i-5 based, and should not be doing much of anything slowly.) At the moment, I can't recall whether the slowdown was already happening before the near-disaster -- probably not. What seems to have sunk the ship -- this time -- was the application of the August MS "Security Rollup" patch. Their move to the "rollup" model, instead of the former individual KB patches, was a terrible idea ! It is a big basket of STUFF, and you never really know exactly what's in it . . . unless something like the "Ask Woody" column at InfoWorld is able to analyze it after the fact. That might happen in the case of a big, widespread disaster. Quality Control at MS is nothing like it once was. Over the last few years, there have been more than a few of their released patches that can turn your PC into a boat anchor. I've had to recover a few PCs from this, every so often. Sometimes it required resorting to replacing the boot partition with an earlier image of it, and losing some things in the process.
For this reason, I have mostly held off on the patches, waiting some time until I could try to vet them for issues. That is a habit I really should have stuck to. Anyway, the result here was another boot failure loop. The so-called "Startup Repair" feature is unavailing, more often than not, as was the case here. After a lot of frustration I finally managed to get to the "Last Known Good Profile" (which proved unusually difficult), and reboot with that. But now everything seems to be running slowly. It could be most-recent-image time for that rig.
This morning, on one of my home rigs, I encountered an even worse slowdown . . . but neither that patch nor any other has been applied to it recently. Was there some new malware on the loose, as yet not well reported ? The situation seems to have stabilized for now though, after a couple reboots, so I'm hoping this was just some transitory glitch. But I just updated Avast and am running a full scan with it as I type this. We shall see.
Jordan
From: Carl Distefano
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, September 6, 2017 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: OT: Kaspersky anti-virus software
Reply to note from Lynn Brenner
mailto:lynn.brenner.nyc@xxxxxxxx Tue, 5 Sep
2017 08:51:47 -0400
> Should the average consumer abandon Kaspersky? And if so, what's
> the optimal alternative?
No comment on Kaspersky. But I will say that I have no reason to
abandon the U.S.-based McAfee, which I've used for 3+ years, with no
complaints. It quarantines stuff from time to time, which I guess is
good. I've had few if any false positives, also good. In general it
stays out of the way, but it's also easy to temporarily disable when I
need to. And their customer service is first-rate, as I discovered a
few weeks ago when one of their programs mysteriously stopped working.
So if you think Kaspersky is less than horrorshow, trying sinking your
zoobies into McAfee.
--
Carl Distefano
mailto:cld@xxxxxxxx