WinXP heavy disk I/O with Antivirus enabled.

[ponder]

I'm about to pull my hair out. I have a laptop here with WinXP installed which works fine as long as no antivirus is installed. I have done scans for trojans, malware, spyware & virii etc but it's clean (SuperAntiSpyWare, A-Squared, Sophos) . It used to have Norton antivirus on which expired.

What I have done to the laptop is uninstall norton. Deleted mail folders to make space for a defrag, resize partition, copied mail back, converted fat32 to ntfs file system and apply windows updates until before SP3.

Problem is as soon as I install any anti-virus software the disk & cpu usage goes through the roof even after the initial scan which makes the laptop unbearably slow. I have tried Avira, Avast & MSE all with the same results. If I disable the antivirus software the laptop works fine and is pretty snappy.

Filemon just shows disk i/o from the antivir on a constant basis.

Any ideas?

 

[killadoob]

Have you reloaded it fresh i mean it did that norton rubbish on it.

Reload it fresh.

 

[LazyLion]

there is tool to completely remove all elements of Norton somewhere on the internet.

but Ja, a clean install is highly recommended!

and this time load Microsoft Security Essentials. It has a very low overhead.

 

[ponder]

Have you reloaded it fresh i mean it did that norton rubbish on it.

Reload it fresh.

Sorry, not an option for me otherwise I would have. It's someone I knows laptop and they are clueless. It has legit MSOffice, Photoshop, Pastel etc installed and they have no clue where their install CD's & license keys are and I'm not about to play pirate for someone else.

If they gave me the CD's I would have formatted the HD from the word go as that is the only way to fix MS stuff imho.

Something else I noticed the HD gets fragmented very quickly, with fat32 it was like 23% after a few reboots from the previous defrag, with ntfs however it's only about 3%.

Something seriously screwed here.

 

[Conradl]

What files is the AV trying to access, can you post the filemon output?

 

[ponder]

there is tool to completely remove all elements of Norton somewhere on the internet.

but Ja, a clean install is highly recommended!

and this time load Microsoft Security Essentials. It has a very low overhead.

I'll google for it thanks. EDIT: Is it called SymRT or Norton Removal Tool as I just downloaded both?

I wish I could do a clean install as I would have spent less time than I did so far fixing this biatch.

It's currently running MSE and it's the lease resource intensive out of the 3 I trust Actually gonna put it on my WinXP desktop partition.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm much more comfortable fixing problems in linux than MS even though my MS experience is way longer where you usually just format & reinstall

 

[ponder]

What files is the AV trying to access, can you post the filemon output?

It's a constant stream, looks like just about anything on the HD, it does not stop.

I'll reboot just now and try to upload to pastebin or something if space allows.

 

[LazyLion]

I'll google for it thanks. EDIT: Is it called SymRT or Norton Removal Tool as I just downloaded both?

http://service1.symantec.com/Support/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039

same thing... Symantec is Norton

 

[ponder]

http://service1.symantec.com/Support/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039

same thing... Symantec is Norton

Shot, looks like I got the correct one.

Also found this:
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_to_fully_remove_norton_from_pc.html
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_fully_remove_norton_antivirus_from_my_system.html

What a festering pile of dog turd.

 

[kingrob]

FAT32 is a much faster file system than NTFS, cos it doesn't have the "overheads" associated with NTFS....so yes, FAT32 will ace NTFS any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

If you want to do some serious housekeeping on the XP notebook, use TuneUp Utilities. It's free and the full program you can use for 30 days. Just click the 1-click maintenance icon on the desktop & TuneUp will do the rest. Run the main program and it will list all gunk that's slowing the system down, like Adobe Reader & Quicktime in the startup.....you get the idea. You can get TuneUp here : www.tune-up.com

Last thing to do is download AVG Free Edition (it's a 67MB download, so make sure they have bandwidth to spare) and then you have pretty much done what you could. You can get AVG Free Edition here : www.free.avg.com

Hope this helps ponder....and if you have helped out the Windoze crowd, can you perhaps help me with OpenLDAP & Samba on a proper OS, called Linux?

 

[ponder]

FAT32 is a much faster file system than NTFS, cos it doesn't have the "overheads" associated with NTFS....so yes, FAT32 will ace NTFS any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

If you want to do some serious housekeeping on the XP notebook, use TuneUp Utilities. It's free and the full program you can use for 30 days. Just click the 1-click maintenance icon on the desktop & TuneUp will do the rest. Run the main program and it will list all gunk that's slowing the system down, like Adobe Reader & Quicktime in the startup.....you get the idea. You can get TuneUp here : www.tune-up.com

Last thing to do is download AVG Free Edition (it's a 67MB download, so make sure they have bandwidth to spare) and then you have pretty much done what you could. You can get AVG Free Edition here : www.free.avg.com

Hope this helps ponder....and if you have helped out the Windoze crowd, can you perhaps help me with OpenLDAP & Samba on a proper OS, called Linux?

NTFS however has faster search & indexing compare to fat32 and fragments way less.

Shot, I'll give TuneUP a spin on the problematic laptop.

I'm not a big fan of AVG, it used to be my AV of choice years ago but it seems to lost out in recent years. For free I prefer Avira, MSE & Avast these days. Plenty of spare bandwidth, on uncapped here

Never used LDAP but I'm sure I could help with SAMBA & try LDAP. Just let me know what distro & version you are using and I'll install it then we can work it out. But it will have to be next week some time as my week is full seeing I'm seconding at the Duzi this week.

 

[LazyLion]

FAT32 is a much older file system technology. I would prefer to use a newer one where possible.

And Microsoft Security Essentials is recommended over AVG free, it has a higher detection and removal rate and has lower overhead. AVG free has pretty high system drag, even the free edition.

 

[kingrob]

Never used LDAP but I'm sure I could help with SAMBA & try LDAP. Just let me know what distro & version you are using and I'll install it then we can work it out. But it will have to be next week some time as my week is full seeing I'm seconding at the Duzi this week.

I'm using CentOS (RHEL free version) 5.4 & 389 Directory Server.

Leave LDAP alone if you dont have to, it's been a painful experience for me.

 

[kingrob]

FAT32 is a much older file system technology. I would prefer to use a newer one where possible.

And Microsoft Security Essentials is recommended over AVG free, it has a higher detection and removal rate and has lower overhead. AVG free has pretty high system drag, even the free edition.

FAT32 might be old, but definitely not cold....and it defrags very quick.

Haven't tried Microsoft Security Essentials before, does it run on XP and Vista as well? Thought it's only for Windows 7.

 

[ponder]

FAT32 might be old, but definitely not cold....and it defrags very quick.

Haven't tried Microsoft Security Essentials before, does it run on XP and Vista as well? Thought it's only for Windows 7.

It might defrag quick but it's rate of fragmentation is much higher than on ntfs, fragmentation on fat32 is frightening.

MSE runs on XP and up with now hassles, very light in resource usage from what I can see.

EDIT: As far as MS goes they have not done much wrt filesystems. The world of Linux & Unix is way ahead when we have a look at the likes of ZFS, Btrfs & Ext4 for example.

 

[ponder]

Not coming right here. Seeing the laptop only has 256MB of ram shared with video chipset I'm gonna try and throw some ram at it to solve the problem. Only problem is none of the local places seems to have stock, aaarrgggghhhhhh.

 

[LazyLion]

what kind of RAM?

 

[Abe]

FAT32 might be old, but definitely not cold....and it defrags very quick.

And it has a file size limit of 4GB.

 

[ponder]

what kind of RAM?

DDR2-667 SODIMM

Local stores in the vicinity don't have stock and same goes for their suppliers (the usual crowd). I phoned for this about two weeks ago and no go, ja I know I should have ordered online

Will call the local dudes after lunch again.

Thing is it takes ddr2-400 ram but that is very expensive so I'm going for the more common & cheaper ddr2-667 ram which should work by all accounts.

Laptop has to go back to it's owner today or first thing tomorrow morning as I'm leaving for the rest of the week.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Agreed on Microsoft Security Essentials. Low overhead, and works quite well.