Question for the GEEKS

[Max]

Upon booting my my computer this morning I got as far as the desktop, with about half of the tray icons loading up. Then, the system just hung there as the ESET Nod32 was loading. There were no mouse or keyboard inputs available so I did a reboot with the power button...3x same thing. Finally got it to come around. Any thoughts as to what caused this? I'm suspecting early warnings of a faulty HD. I'll run a scandisk and ESET scan to rule out bad HD sectors or a virus.

Don't think it's related but I have both MS Security Essentials and ESET Nod32 active. Should I disable one or the other?

Thanks.

[Masherbrum]

If you have ESET.....MS Essentials is not necessary.

[guncrasher]

yeah disable ms security essential.  you should only have 1 av and 1 firewall installed on your system.  I think I am gonna switch to security essentials as my esset expires this month.


semp

[Bizman]

Yes, having two active antivirus programs can cause freezing. Luckily both are quite light, so the problem only occurs every now and then. The freezing is due to their nature: When one does it's av things, the other one thinks it is suspicious for a program to know such tricks and makes a quick scan. Which of course rings alarm at the first one, causing it to check the matter. And there you have the perpetuum mobile running. Naturally this takes all available resources from the computer, making it to freeze.

[Max]

Thanks gents. I'll turn off MSE.

[gyrene81]

security essentials was probably doing a boot up scan at the time eset was trying to load. it's not advisable to run more than one anti-virus on your system but, if you're running windows 7 or vista, you will have windows defender, windows security essentials (if you downloaded it) and whatever anti-virus you installed. look under scheduled tasks and disable any scheduled scans for defender and security essentials that you find.

also, if you haven't done it already, turn off windows update in the control panel, then stop the service and set it to manual start. that way you can run updates when you want to without the system kicking off the process when you really don't want it.

[BaldEagl]

Yes, having two active antivirus programs can cause freezing. Luckily both are quite light, so the problem only occurs every now and then. The freezing is due to their nature: When one does it's av things, the other one thinks it is suspicious for a program to know such tricks and makes a quick scan. Which of course rings alarm at the first one, causing it to check the matter. And there you have the perpetuum mobile running. Naturally this takes all available resources from the computer, making it to freeze.

Well, I'm not 100% that's exactly the case but its a good story and you're going with it.      

[Bizman]

Well, I'm trying to make my living by being "the geek" for households. Since most of my customers are elderly people or otherwise technically unsavvy, I have developed a way to tell things in an earthy way using terms they know from their everyday life. Like "RAM works the same way you remember something by heart, virtual memory is like a noteblock. Figure which is faster..." helps me to sell another stick of RAM to a pennypincher.

Gyrene had a more technically sophisticated explanation.