OT: Looking for good virus protection on PC

Its much longer than it use to take, so something must be wrong. Normally when you click shutdown it starts making sounds indicating that its shutting down. It pauses for a long time. Long enough that I can click on other icons and start something up.

A thought - when you're ready to shut down, go into task manager and see if there are any tasks running. Also check memory and CPU usage - it could be that you're out of RAM, so you're paging and swapping to disk. What I'm saying, is either you have processes still running, or the processes you know about, are running differently. task manager should be able to help you figure out which of those two is the case.

Dave "No really, I'm not a Windows guy, dammit!" Hinz

Hi Chuck,

Mark Russinovich has some nice, free utilities you should check out here:

Especially look over:

Autoruns v8.43

Process Explorer v9.25

and you should also get his root kit detector from this listing:

RootkitRevealer v1.6

Good luck playing around with some new utilities and let us know what you find.

Norton and McAfee are both disasters waiting to happen. I've seen so many systems eventually break down due to recurring bugs or other errors with SystemWorks, etc. Microsoft Office stops working, printer stops working, disk corruption or lost data, and people who actually want to reinstall it after removing it to fix these problems find they can't even re-install the program due to extreme registry corruption. I would reccomend uninstalling everything and also going on Norton's website for the tool that completely uninstalls it (yes folks, the Norton uninstaller doesn't really uninstall it), SymNRT for the newer versions, something else for the older ones.

Double click on the little 4-color square in your taskbar, look for the Scheduler, highlight it then press the Scheduled Tasks button, double-click on each task that you want to remove and disable it.

Have you run AdAware and Spybot, Search & Destroy (run Ad-Aware first) on your system? They are free programs for spyware removal. I'm not sure if that program you mentioned is a virus or spyware, but most virus scanners do not detect most spyware programs unless it's specifically designed to do harm to your computer. Spyware is more likely to simply pop up ads, track your search habits, or just bog down the system. You should be running these programs at least twice monthly anyway.

Have you installed any programs that would be running in memory? Most systems shut down quite quickly initially, but slow down even if they're well maintained and scanned. Once you add printer(s), scanner(s), digital camera software (which usually sits in the memory), virus scanner (memory resident), Spy Sweeper (one of the few spyware programs that runs in the memory - I find this program too annoying to use), firewall, MP3 player software, Palm Pilot sync software, Quicktime/RealPlayer/Adobe Reader/Microsoft Works/Office Launcher/various other programs that sit in the memory, some necessary, some not - your system will be slow to shutdown because it has to kill each and every one of these programs. If you have Spybot, you can put it in Advance Mode, look under the Tools for System Startup. Go through the list, and google each one of the programs (use the exact program name, such as WrksFud.exe or qttask.exe in the search, liutilities.com has a big list) and find out which ones you can turn off. Even then, it might be slow, the more you install on the system, the slower the shutdown (and the system itself, eventually) is going to get.

I recently installed a printer and scanner. I discounted the printer because it is a network printer and the other computer still shuts down quickly. I went through task manager and indeed there is a scanner process running. I googled many of the running tasks and they could be normal or a virus. I am assuming they are ok since AVG is happy. That leaves the scanner. This scanner is pretty old but the software is new off of HP's web site. Looks like my option is to live with it or replace the scanner. I might experiement and see if the shutdown time is related to the scanner state(unpluged vs pluged in) there is not pwr sw.