Kaspersky causes Windows 7 slowdown

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

When even Linus Torvalds is heaping sardonic praise on Windows 7, you know Microsoft must be doing something right. But the gloss was definitely starting to come off for my colleague Stuart Turton and I over the past week or so.

For some unfathomable reason, Word 2007 was really starting to struggle – letters would appear on screen an annoying second or so after you typed them, and scrolling through long documents produced more jerks than an X-Factor audition. Not an ideal scenario for harassed journalists on press week.

Word’s not usually the first application to exhibit performance problems. If your processor or memory are being pushed to breaking point, you’d normally expect 3D games or DVD playback to be suffering from the heebie-jeebies first – but both those applications were fine on our systems. A performance widget on my desktop also confirmed that the processor and 3GB of memory in my laptop weren’t being unduly burdened by Word, either.

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Unbundle me

Friday, May 9th, 2008

I installed Windows XP SP3 on my home PC this morning. The process went smoothly, and surprisingly quickly; but after the inevitable reboot a screen came up pestering me to turn on automatic updates. This I do not appreciate.

It’s not that I think automatic updates are necessarily a bad idea.* But why bug me about it now? I can only surmise that Microsoft really hates the fact that I’ve chosen to manage my own computer; so they’ve decided to tack a nuisance requester onto an unrelated process in the hope of nagging me into quiescence.

This sort of opportunistic piggybacking used to be the preserve of spyware. But, sad to say, these days I’m increasingly finding unrelated crap bundled into otherwise legitimate packages. (more…)