October 2017 Challenge: The Story of Golthra and Iriana

[Mouse]

Thank you Falconius

One of the members over at Profantasy Forum said they had to roll back the update just to get their machine to work again. Mine is very sluggish and things keep freezing or crashing when they wouldn't have crashed before the update.

Wacom gave me a new driver, but the behaviour is as I described above. GIMP only wants to play 'move the map around', and Krita won't even play until you give up and try to shut down.

I have absolutely no idea if its the Wacom driver, the Win update, or a combination of the two things.

I'm thinking about rolling back and trying to find the money to buy some independent antivirus, because I won't be able to trust an out of date version of Windows Defender. That's why I haven't done it so far. Can't afford a new antivirus app.

[ladiestorm]

I'd try avast, even their free version is better than windows defender alone.

[Mouse]

On its own Windows Defender is a great antivirus. I trust it. I just don't trust Win 10 anymore.

I would like to go back to having Kaspersky, but that's just waaaaaay out of my pocket for now.

[Falconius]

Yeah I've used AVG before too, didn't have any problems with it. Avast has apparently acquired AVG.

[Mouse]

I had a terrible experience with the free antivirus that came with my laptop a couple of years back. I was told that it was basically adware for the company that wrote it. Sure, it stopped the virus, but it actually opened the door and encouraged adware.

Took a trip to the PC Doctor to work out what was eating my broadband and slowing my machine down.

Since then I've been extremely cautious about free antivirus packages.

Neither of you have mentioned its name so far, but I'll let you know if you do! LOL!

[Straf]

Mouse if you roll back your machine the AV will still update to the latest set of definitions and version. It wouldn't compromise your system. Windows Defender is the Win10 version of Microsoft Security Essentials I believe. I ran that on Win7 for a good while and was very happy with it. I used to use AVG before that but it became more and more bloated then started to nag me about upgrading to a paid version. So I ditched it.

Completely running off topic here I remember a colleague at the place I worked saying the laptop he'd got his son had stopped working properly. It wouldn't connect to the router or anything. So I offered to help and took it home for a look at it and discovered there were two proprietary anti-viruses battling each other for control over the network layer. I went in the next day and asked why he had two AVs installed and he said when he bought it from the very well known electrical store chain (that could also be an Indian restaurant chain if they wanted) they said he'd need an anti-virus and they charged him an extra £50 to install one for him. The laptop came with one already installed and active, so both of these were blocking one another. Thankfully he said that wiping it and starting from fresh was an option as there wasn't anything crucial on there that needed to be kept. I think it came with MacAfee and they installed Norton, two notoriously difficult AVs to completely dig out of the registry, even after the uninstall programs are run.

I know these things that come bundled keep the prices down - e.g. HP and MacAfee free trial, then most people will probably pay the annual fee or whatever, but the way they used to dig their claws deep into the system so it took aqualungs and all sorts of survival equipment for a 2 day expedition into the registry to remove all their settings was almost mafia tactics. I don't know if they've got their act together because of anti-trust laws or what but it seems a lot simpler now. Norton was the gatekeeper for everything traversing the network layer and by simply uninstalling it there'd be nothing there to 'vet' network traffic and so nothing would work. IIRC there were several places in the registry where it had to be switched back to normal settings.

[Mouse]

Well it was that very store you mentioned (sorry about this anyone who's not really following the clues but hints don't get you sued!) and their packaged antivirus that came with the laptop that I had all that trouble with.... And yes, you've mentioned the little so-and-so right there! That was the one. "Its little more than Adware" was the PC Doctor's verdict - word for word.

He got rid of it, and My system was suddenly sweet as a nut. I ran with Kaspersky for a while before I lost my last permanent job, and then by the time I couldn't afford to renew it Win 10 came along with Windows Defender.

Defender successfully captured and destroyed a very nasty little hacker device that came sniffing around my machine a couple of months ago, and nothing else has worried my machine in all the time I've been using it.

I know that the update did include an update to the actual working bits of Defender, so although it would continue to update its definitions even if I rolled it back, would the old code work well enough armed with new lists to ward off any further attacks?

[Falconius]

I think the definitions etc. are a separate thing so would not be effected, but I don't know. In any case if your machine has stopped working because of it, roll it back, I mean the machine might as well have an actual virus the way it sounds.

We used to run Norton on our machines years ago and it was terrible, I always hated it, I thought it was an ugly program in all its aspects, and it would never shut up. We are running Mcafee now (2 or 3 years) and it just stays in the background doing its thing and hardly ever bothers me, in fact its user experience seems pretty good now. But there was that whole kerfuffle with Mcafee and its CEO a few years ago so maybe things changed. That said I've not tried to uninstall it either (there's been no need).

[Mouse]

Well, you've mentioned the monster I had to get rid of at least twice there

It ate my broadband allowance like nobody's business!

I'm seriously considering a rollback. I just need to think about this a bit more, because I only have this one machine, and if I make a mess of this I'll simply disappear... um, if you see what I mean - gone from the scene.

[Mouse]

OMG

IT... is updating again....

Well, I suppose I'm just going to have to let it happen in case its an immediate fix for the first update, but if it goes from bad to worse I'll roll back both of them and stop any further updates till I work out what to do.

EDIT: Since these things are dead slow and very boring, and I want to go to bed some time tonight without leaving it running, I'm going to shut everything else down to speed it up just a bit. If you don't hear from me again in a long time then it all went most horribly wrong! LOL!