Windows Defender and McAfee Anti-virus

[Guest]

Windows Defender and McAfee Anti-virus are utilizing 100% of my CPU.
MsMpEng.exe stays at 45-98% frequently. I see the Mcshield jump in and take
what ever is left sometimes, not always. McAfee seems to settle down after
several minutes... But MsMpEng takes a long time to return to a normal
"state".

This makes my other applications run extremely slow. Most of the time I'm
waiting for my keystrokes to catch up so I can see what I'm trying to type...

Anyone got any suggestions? I just perform windows update to get the
latest... but I can't update definitions via the help/about/update button...
get an error message 0x8024002B.

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

Have you applied all (non-beta) critical updates offered at Windows Update?

Is this a home machine, or one joined to a domain?

What McAfee product and version?

 

[Guest]

Yes, just installed all critical updates. Work machine joined to a domain. XP
Pro.

 

[Guest]

McAfee Enterprise V8.0.0
--
Lance Napier

Have you applied all (non-beta) critical updates offered at Windows Update?

Is this a home machine, or one joined to a domain?

What McAfee product and version?

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

On the update issue: Within the program, WIndows Defender updates via
AutoUpdate, which will connect to whatever your network policies
determine--take a look (start, run, notepad %windir%\windowsupdate.log) and
search on "server url" and see what you are connecting to.

If it is a SUS or third party server, Windows Defender definitions are not
available. If it is WSUS, the administrator can choose to distribute
Windows Defender definitions, if company policy makes this appropriate.

I've seen a handful of other messages relating to McAfee and Windows
Defender which could be a similar issue to yours--not many though, and most
people haven't given versions. Running an update or repair to Windows
Defender couldn't hurt--start, control panel, add or remove programs,
Windows Defender, change, update.

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[Jeff]

Ah,
One I can answer, am running Mcafee Enterprize 8.0 and defender. When it
comes to these apps;my solution was just to schedule them at diffrent times.
These scans-just by their nature-are very cpu costly. Running them on a
Dell Dimension 8300 pentium 4 w/HT which at the time;was a great cpu;because
of HT was bearable. Running them together definetly caused a significant
response time loss for any apps trying to execute. And with my new laptop
with an Intel T2500 dual core-still the same result. So I scheduled them at
different times;still slow;but bearable.

Jeff

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

Thanks, Jeff.

A full scan with Windows Defender is often noted to be resource-intensive.
The Help for the program recommends regular (daily?) quickscans, and a
fullscan when something is found--or there's some reason to be looking
harder at a machine. I've been doing that on my systems, although I do
fullscans on servers at night, on the theory that it might find something
sitting in users file space.

--

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the input. But, I don't have virus scan-disk on auto-schedule.
Defenders is scheduled for 2AM and usually my laptop is off at that time...
However, this happened sporadically and since doing recommendations from
Bill, I haven't had this to occur again.

I am mainly relying on the real-time protection, I do scans manually and
occasionally. But I will definitely keep this in mind if I do set a schedule.

I am just going to monitor for now... Thanks again!

Lance

 

[Guest]

This continues to be a problem!!!! I am dissappointed in this product and I
wish I could get the original AntiSpyware back!!! So much for Bill's war on
spyware. I think I will have to unistall this pgm because it seems to suck up
all my resources (when not running any scans).

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

Lance - I don't know what's happening on your system, but this isn't typical
of Windows Defender. I have it running on PII-300 systems without issue,
for example.

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