4 ms·
I would be more bothered if other vendors anti-malware wasn't terrible. Every virus-like behavior I've seen over the past several years was actually anti-malwa
by three14 15y ago
I would be more bothered if other vendors anti-malware wasn't terrible. Every virus-like behavior I've seen over the past several years was actually anti-malware misbehaving. One particular peeve is disk usage - anti-virus scans at a low priority, but somehow the disk slows to a crawl anyway. I suspect that the antivirus gets fewer I/O requests serviced, but causes many seeks so once it gets an I/O request honored, the disk is tied up until the seek completes. It would be nice if the OS took care of this, but given that it doesn't, I blame the anti-malware vendors for not caring about their customers.
- brc 15y agoI say this to many people. If the definition of a virus or malware is something that hinders performance and functionality of your computer, then most commercial AV products fit the bill. They have a massive footprint, stop you doing normal things, constantly interrupt you and generally are impossible to remove completely. It staggers me how competition in the anti-virus market gave us so many bad products. Even the ones that started out good slowly morphed into expensive bloatware. Security Essentials was the first step against that trend, and I'm happy to see it go all the way.
- yuhong 15y agoI think Norton 2009 started the trend.
- T-hawk 15y ago> It staggers me how competition in the anti-virus market gave us so many bad products. They all suffer from the problem of "This rock keeps tigers away." A large proportion of AV instances never incur any malware at all; it gets stopped at the corporate firewall level or the users just don't browse to any infected sites. So how can you tell that the AV package is even doing anything? It must keep itself in the user's face to seem productive, or else that AV package will lose sales to a competitor that looks like it does more. You know all those email taglines "This message was scanned by Norton AV" or whatever? Those are trivially fakeable and carry zero security meaning, or even worse than zero in tricking someone into falling for a fake. Their presence is obvious when you understand what they really are: advertising for the AV package. Security Essentials is the first AV package that's not motivated primarily by sales, so it has the ability to stay out of the way where commercial AV products can't. (Why does MS Security Essentials exist at all? I recall one MS blogger, probably Raymond Chen, mention in passing that MSSE was created to reduce Microsoft's own support workload, as a fair number of support tickets with Microsoft are caused by malware.)
- vilya 15y agoThe disk performance problem may be because all the file accesses effectively flush the disk cache, rather than just the number of seeks. Other than that, couldn't agree with you more (and that's why I don't use Windows machines these days unless there's no other option).
- three14 15y agoIt could be, but virus scanners don't use FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING? It seems relatively easy for them, and if some did and some didn't you'd get reviews like "slower than the competition".