Ted's Blog

Now that I have my laptop, I thought I'd try installing Kaspersky. It installed easily enough on Sunday and then downloaded a fairly big update, which is to be expected. Then it started a system scan. Soon it was up to a thousand files. I let it running by itself, realizing the first full hard disk scan would take some time. A few hours later it was still scanning. Because the laptop was set to go to sleep after an hour of no use, it would go to sleep and I would need to wake it up to keep the scan going. I did this several times Sunday before going to bed.

The next morning it was up to 20,000 files. I thought that was pretty crazy. Why would Vista install so many files? I checked the properties of the Windows folder to see how many files were in there and it was about 20,000 so I figured it would be done soon. Before I went to work I changed the automatic sleep setting so the computer would keep running. When I got home it was up to 40,000 files. That night it was up to 60,000. The next morning it was up to 80,000. This thing is scanning 24 hours a day now! Tuesday night it was over 100,000 files.

I got on Kaspersky's discussion boards and looked for answers. There were some people who had problem with Norton conflicting, but I didn't have Norton. They have a program you can download that gets all of your computer's system info and posts it to a web page so people can help you out. I did that. I posted a message asking for help and a few people offered some advice that didn't really help (allow Kaspersky to hog resources, turn off Google desktop). This morning a message was posted suggesting I try the scan in Safe Mode. So I had to learn how to do that (press F8 right after the boot menu). The scan was going really fast and was up to 20,000 files in about 20 minutes before I had to go to work. When I got back home the computer had scanned 160,000 files in 35 minutes.

I don't know what other things to turn off to duplicate that kind of performance in normal mode. I turned off the touchpad icon in the system tray and tried turning off the wireless network card. Still pretty slow. I tried uninstalling Kaspersky and reinstalling. I noticed when I did this it would zip through the first 10,000 files pretty quickly and then bog down. There are some large archive files that Vista uses as backups of the system files that I knew would take a while to read and scan, but there couldn't be all that many of them. I tried reinstalling but not allowing Kaspersky to update itself. That kind of worked, but it would slow down after the first 10,000.

Back on the help board someone suggested I download the latest version of Kaspersky 7, which apparently doesn't automatically happen. I downloaded the 38 MB file and tried to install it before getting some kind of disk read error for a .cab file.

Very frustrating. I also bought a 3-license version of Trend Internet Security which Consumer Reports ranks very highly. I installed it on Susan's computer a few months ago and it seems okay, but seemed to make her computer a little sluggish. I could use it as a last resort.