Computer Disaster Corner

[walpurgis]

Been trying some anti spyware solutions. I had 10bit Malware Fighter on there briefly. No good, despite its popularity. It had something called IMF.exe running in the background using loads of processor capacity, so it was soon uninstalled. Malwarebytes is always dependable, but does slow PCs down a bit. As does the latest incarnation of Spybot. I always install One Click Spyware Expert anyway, regardless of what else I may use. It's an old utility, but free and works on all Windows installations and it digs deep, finding all sorts of bugs. Not real time though, manual scans. I'm just messing about really, my security suite from Comodo covers every need anyway.

[AJSki2fly]

Been trying some anti spyware solutions. I had 10bit Malware Fighter on there briefly. No good, despite its popularity. It had something called IMF.exe running in the background using loads of processor capacity, so it was soon uninstalled. Malwarebytes is always dependable, but does slow PCs down a bit. As does the latest incarnation of Spybot. I always install One Click Spyware Expert anyway, regardless of what else I may use. It's an old utility, but free and works on all Windows installations and it digs deep, finding all sorts of bugs. Not real time though, manual scans. I'm just messing about really, my security suite from Comodo covers every need anyway.

Geoff, anti virus software unfortunately can be memory and CPU hungry, when I had a PC I found Kaspersky to be better that most, but do not know what it is like now. With respect to a computer fans spinning up and getting hot apart from heavy processes such as Video, music and high CPU usage then it can be caused with age due to the thermal heat sink paste between CPU and/or GPU processors getting old and hard stopping proper heat transfer. If a computer is used everyday for several hours in my experience the paste starts to harden at around 4-5 years.

Simple solution if you can get to then inside is to take the heat sink(s) off, usually held down with 4 bolts to motherboard and then clean the old of the CPU/GPU with kitchen roll and isopropyl alcohol and do same to the heat sink. Then get small tube of new thermal paste and run a small fillet across the top of the CPU/GPU put heat sink on top and do up screws, the pressure will squeeze the thermal paste out. This should sort things out for a few years.

[walpurgis]

Geoff, anti virus software unfortunately can be memory and CPU hungry, when I had a PC I found Kaspersky to be better that most, but do not know what it is like now.

I've been relying on Security Essentials for some time now and had no issues.

I did however try out the now old Threatfire, behaviour based A/V for a while, which has a very low demand on computer resources. An interesting product. I've noticed that some of the more well known A/V offerings now include a behaviour based element as well as the regular signature detection (which requires continual definitions updates).

Threatfire still works and can still be downloaded: https://threatfire.informer.com/