McAfee "VShield" hanging on startup?

[marcusgunby]

Is the free AVG antivirus software any good-i have it on mine now and it seems like im virus free-you auto update it weekly for free which is nice.

 

[wayneg]

I have noticed on our servers (one of which has a 1GHz Pentium III processor similar to the 1.3GHz processor in my laptop) that the McAfee rectangle does stay up a bit longer than on my laptop. This is because after you logon there are other services still starting for quite a while, and the McAfee thing hangs around until the machine has finished doing this stuff. I would say that you probably have a lot of other programs starting up at the same time when you are logging in. The easiest way to see this is if you have a lot of little icons in the right hand side of the task bar at the bottom of your screen. Apart from removing other software then you will always get this happening, and memory upgrades aren't really going to help you too much - relax, be patient, go have a coffee or something.

 

[Smit-Dog]

Originally posted by wayneg
... I would say that you probably have a lot of other programs starting up at the same time when you are logging in. The easiest way to see this is if you have a lot of little icons in the right hand side of the task bar at the bottom of your screen.

Good point Wayneg.

Lou - Check your startup folder to see what's getting launched at startup. There are other background processes that may also be starting up that are not in your Startup folder, and you can view those in your registry.

Open your registry and do a search for the string "Run", and under the "Look At" checkboxes, only check "Keys", and then check "Match whole string only". This will find all keys named "Run" that contain a list of programs/processes that startup automatically when Windows boots up.

If you are at all unfamilar with using/viewing the Registry, get someone to help you who is. Basically you can disable certain "Run" programs one at a time to see if one in particular is causing the problem with McAfee. Or at the very least, it can help you gauge whether temporarily disabling a startup program affects the real or perceived startup time for McAfee. You have to restart after disabling/re-enabling each startup program to see the effect.

WARNING: Please note that modifying the registry this way can have ADVERSE effects on your computer! Proceed with caution, and get someone who understands the ramifications registry changes can have to help you out.

 

[keith500r]

I wasnt really considering price when i said XP pro, i guess that makes sense. Sometimes I forget I work with mostly industrial computers and they are always asking for some elaborate setup.. Ive had much better luck getting the Pro version of XP to do what I need quckly.

I said hang because that was the term being used. I know its not locked up, its just doing stuff. my point was there are other virus programs that dont do 'stuff' every time on bootup. of course speeding up the computer is going to improve that but so will getting rid of mcafee. Mcafee is a kind of a resouce hog.

OEM HD speed rating- he he.. Unless the computer is speciflcally advertised as as some kind of ultra performance thing, you probably have a run of the mill hard drive. The point I was trying to make here is hard drives are slow in general. even the fastest drive on the market isnt nearly enough to realize the potential of todays computers.. if you dont believe that, try 2 or four drives together in a RAID setup, striped configuration. you'll think someone slipped a new processor in your system.

ever noticed how the little red hard drive LED light is always on solid when your computer is really working? hmmm..

 

[yzeater]

Originally posted by keith500r
if you dont believe that, try 2 or four drives together in a RAID setup, striped configuration. you'll think someone slipped a new processor in your system.

I have 4 15k 36 gig's RAID'ed together. Not really, but it'd be cool if I did :confused:

 

[marcusgunby]

I adgree on laptops being slow-my work one is a dell 1 gig 256meg windows 2000 etc-its crap, it has almost nothing on it and isnt much faster than my old one-it was a P1 133 with 48meg and windows 95.

 

[Zenith]

keith500- I wasn't saying that faster drives are no benefit, I'm well aware of the bottle necks, I was just making the point it wasn't relevant in this situation. I'm not much of a RAID "head" but from what I know of striping it is fairly dangerous right? If one drive goes down you will effectively loose all your files on all the striped drives.

wayneg - That IS a good point, I've never thought of it before, I'll have to look into that the next time I come across the problem! Thanks!

A safer way to view programs that are starting up but don't appear in the startup folder(and most don't!) is to use the System Information program which you'll find in your Start Menu under Sytem Tools. In System Information go to the Tools menu, then select System Configuration Utility, when this utility starts select the Startup tab. You can then tick or untick programs you want to start, you could untick a load of unimportant ones and see what happens when you restart, then just tick them again to return your PC to the way it was! Don't UnTick TaskMonitor or SystemTray btw :)...

Marcus - It's hard to know, free software under GPL licence etc. is often as good if not better then the stuff you buy, there just may be the odd bug and you don't tend to get support. Support is all you're paying for with a lot of software... If you're sure it works then I'm sure it's fine, just keep the virus definition files up to date...

 

[wayneg]

Yes laptops are slow, but if you want something that goes about as fast as I ride get one of the new tablet PCs. Unbelievable!!!!! This thing is just really unbelievable!!! I am lost for words because of the sheer lack of speed on the damn thing :scream: :whiner:

 

[keith500r]

quote - striping it is fairly dangerous right? If one drive goes down you will effectively loose all your files on all the striped drives.


this is also true for every single drive computer system. the only extra risk I see with raid striping is that you have 2 drives at risk of going bad instead of one so your risk of a drive failure is higher. of course, if you have the $$ to spend, RAID can be fast and redundant there are many levels to choose from.

your right im getting pretty far off topic..sorry

 

[wsmc831]

striping is no more dangerous than anything else. if you stripe with parity, you can fail a drive and it will rebuild with no data loss.
nothing like that needed for home, you'll get the best performance from a simple mirror set. I have a drive raid set at home but that's only because my board has a built in ide raid. If you really need fault taulerance and don't want to just backup, another identical ide drive is all ya need.


..uh..what was the question? ;-)

 

[Zenith]

Surely striping is more dangerous then mirroring? Suppose you have 4 8Gb drives striped, now if the FAT got corrupt(somehow) on the 2nd drive then because every file is split across all the drives so 1/4 of every file is inevitably on the 2nd drive then all files are more or less useless? whereas if the drives were all seperate you've only lost 1/4 of your data? Or if mirrored(although you'd have less capacity) you'd loose nothing?
About that parity: I can see how during data transmission parity bits are used to allow the receiver know if data is corrupt or not but in storage if you had say 11101010, even parity with the parity bit being the most first bit, so suppose the disk read head crashes onto this byte and it is changed to 11111010, the parity bit says it's wrong but how does the system know which bit to correct? Or have I got the wrong idea how RAID does parity? One other question if I may(Sorry for hyjacking your thread here Lou!), suppose the original byte changes to 11100000, the parity bit is still set to even so the data appears to be correct even though it's not?

Thanks,
Philip

 

[marcusgunby]

I dont think Lou minds as he and others have long ago decided its better to wait 60 seconds than to try any of your lots ideas;)

 

[wayneg]

:)

 

[keith500r]

hey I said I was off topic didnt I :)

raid mirror only gives extra performance when reading, not writing data, and yes its safer than striping(raid 0, not safer than 0+1). striping gives you better performance all the way around, but mirror is like having a constant backup of your data.

zenith you are exactly right, if any one of the drives in a raid 0 stripe are lost than the entire array is pretty much useless. I dont know exactly how raid with parity works, im pretty sure it requires minimum 3 drives and puts data and parity info on all of the drives so any one can fail without problems.

 

[marcusgunby]

So what about that funky software that runs the o/s from ram-meant to be really fast-however doesnt support Xp because its not based on dos?