Dispatches From Safe Mode: Reverse Cowgirl

I Installed McAfee 2 days ago from my old disks. (I’ve been running without Anti-virus for months.)
I like McAfee. I’ve run it off-and-on for years. It’s much lighter than, say, Norton… just a tiny lag while opening files as it scans them.

So imagine my rude awakening when it downloads updates, (which I’m apparently still entitled to?) and I suddenly realize I’m running something called McAffey “Security Center.”

Now, apparently this has existed since 2005… so I must have had Security Center when i was running XP. That sounds vaguely plausible… I have some memory of there being two active-process icons associated with the program.
But I remember the program I was interacting with as VirusScan– that was where all the “stuff” happened. …not anymore. I am now constantly aware of Security Center’s presence.

Here’s the thing… McAffee’s anti-virus program has grown into a whole suite of bloated crap I don’t want. So naturally… I only install VirusScan– all I want is on-access file scanning! I don’t want their firewall, I don’t want their wireless protection, SiteAdvisor or registry protection. I don’t even want constant scanning… I’ll do one manually when I feel like it.
All I want is on-access file scan. McAfee is good at on-access file scan! I know– I used it for years! It caught shit! So it’s the only component I install.

So I run updates… and my system bogs horribly. What? How could this be? This isn’t what McAffee feels like!
Turns out (upon research) that in mid-2008 McAffee pushed out and update that causes some systems to idiosyncratically bog horribly. It’s idiosyncratic, and somehow related to Vista’s “search for files” function.
Now, I understand how some of McAfee’s functions might intersect with that Vista function… by how in seven green hells is it causing my system to bog when the only thing I’m running is scan-on-access? McAffey is hogging my system resources… yet the only thing I’ve given it permission to do it scan-on-access! This bogging cannot be caused by scan-on-access!

You’ve probably already guessed what I slowly realized.
McAffee Security Center is the ‘hub’ management application meant to coral the 6-or-7 separate tools in their security suite. it doesn’t actually do anything… but you cannot install the tools without installing it, because many common functions run through it.
So despite only having installed VirusScan, and having de-activated 70% of VirusScan’s functionality specifically so the program would have the smallest possible footprint on my system… McAfee had installed a monolithic mega-program designed to insinuate itself into every nook and cranny of my system so that it can manage the 500 different ways its anti-virus tools can rape my performance in the name of perfect security… and then simply turned those functions off.

Security Center is riding my system like a reverse cowgirl. And this is why the spastic allegic reactions between McAffee and Vista’s search functions are going off even though I didn’t (theoretically) install anything that should cause them. Security Center did install itself in these areas. It does so regardless of whether or not you’re using those functions, even if you specifically chose not to install them.

*sigh*

Vista has all the system integrity of two bricks tied together with tissue paper. Thus my desire to tread as lightly as possible, installing a bare-minimum of functions to interfere with the already rickety OS. Anti-virus programs burrow even deeper into the OS than most programs, so this is a very deliberate choice.
And in order to get a single scan-on-access function running… I had to install SecurityCenter, which burrows down and insinuates itself into virtually every function of the system… despite the fact I specifically chose not to install the applications related to that burrowing.
And so, my system wigs out.

This, in itself, doesn’t make for a very interesting story. I uninstalled McAfee and the bog-down stopped.

The part that makes for a good story is that when I rebooted after having done so… my optical drive vanished again. One of the hundreds of system-hooks SecurityCenter first installed, then removed, has managed to fuck it up again.

I’m not a fan of Adobe Bridge, Nero Whatever-its-called or any other “monolitic central component that sucks” that seem to be all the rage in “software suites” these days. When you install Photoshop, you’re not installing Photoshop– you’re installing a special version of the Adobe Creative Suite (with the ‘bridge’ hub-program) whose only suite-component is Photoshop. …but you still get Bridge because the Photoshop program on a fundamental architectural level is no longer capable of ’standing alone.’

That’s fine for Photoshop and stuff… hell, for most suites. It doesn’t really bother me.

But anti-virus is… something different. People have been screaming for years that Anti-virus is terrible (The benchmarks I’ve been reading indicate a 700-1200% computer-slowdown is average for any anti-virus program.) The processing burden placed on a computer is not a subtle one. And when an OS, frankly, sucks as badly as Vista does… crap is going to start breaking. (Crap breaks on vista out of the box. It shipped with a search function that didn’t work.)
It’s… you can’t do this. If McAfee actually intends for it’s program to be useful for people who know what they’re doing… it has to be able to run components in a true standalone fashion, without a central hub that sends tendrils and execution hooks throughout Window’s unstable 47 dependency layers. That’s just daring the operating system to break!

But that’s a good, useful AV program. Which is not the same thing as a good, marketable product. A product has bazillions of functions, and a central hub so you can justify selling them all-in-one to the customer instead of piecemeal.
And a product mentality says… you want to make it hard for the customer to only install part of the suite, and certainly not encourage it. “Because if they buy our AV product, then get a virus… they say we have a bad product even if they’re the ones that decided to turn all the protection off. It’s better for our brand to impose a 700-1200% slowdown that renders computers unusable than to develop a product that leaves computers useful but offers less perfect protection.”

Guess what? Your product is terrible. Not just McAfee… all anti-virus products are terrible. Look at those benchmarks… the 1200% slowdown is middle of the pack. The industry has somehow come together to create a product category so terrible that the only way to use my computer is to run without anti-virus. There is literally not an anti-virus product on the market today that will not make you bleed out of your eyes.

Allow me to be more explicit… I have never had a virus that crippled my computer as badly, or made the system as unstable or as likely to lose data as an Anti-virus program does! These programs act more like viruses than viruses do.
As near as I am able to determine… there does not exist a serious AV solution that allows me to manually scan my computer computer once a week without also demanding I accept it insinuating itself into my OS so that it can fuck my system with perform real-time protection.

(All I want is a virus-scanner! With a single hook to check a file before I open it. 90% of the protection, 10% of the performance hit. I will pay money for this! WHY IS NO ONE WILLING TO SELL IT TO ME?)
Or at least have the decency to look me in the face when you’re screwing me!