The Sorry State Of PC Security (And PC Software In General)
- 11
- Add a Comment
- No Related Post
Warning: This is a pretty long rant.
I’m so fed up with the state of PC security (and PC software) these days… for so many different reasons. But let me back up a little bit and provide some context to this rant. Although my general feelings about PC security range from begrudging resignation to a slow boil of resentment, it all came to a head with my recent purchase of a new HP OfficeJet Pro 7680 All-In-One printer. While I loved my old HP OfficeJet G85, I had kind of outgrown it. The OfficeJet Pro 7680 offered me everything I wanted in an all-in-one (except ink tanks that never run out). It’s a gorgeous printer — fast, networkable, cross-platform, and it prints and scans duplex.
So what does this new printer have to do with PC Security? Well, everything. Call it a convergence of crappy software. Crappy OS, crappy printer software, crappy security software. I guess I’ve been riding a very fine balance with my PC up until this point, and switching printers upset everything. And don’t worry if you can’t figure out yet how this all ties back to security software (and ultimately Windows itself). It will become more clear as you read on.
The first target of my ire is HP. And I have been a faithful HP customer for many, many years. This printer is my third HP All-In-One. My complaint isn’t with the hardware, which I really think is pretty decent. The problem is with the software. It should not take 45 freaking minutes to install the new printer software. Yes, the new printer has many more features that it’s brethren, but I am convinced that the bloated software that came with it is not only unnecessary, but downright evil. Look, HP, I don’t need pictures of shiny happy people peppered throughout the GUI of your printer software. I also don’t need the software to tell me where to go to by replacement ink tanks and online photo services. Just K.I.S.S. me — aka Keep it Simple, Stupid. This may be a sophisticated printer that can do everything but wash my dishes, but surely you can make software that isn’t the digital equivalent of Jenga. Quite frankly, I preferred the software that used with my OfficeJet G85. It was kind of hokey looking, but it did everything quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
I just want to print, scan, copy and fax. Without gobbling up all the CPU cycles on my 2GB Pentium-D processor. Which, coincidentally, is sitting inside my HP Pavilion Media Center m7250n PC. Oh, lest I forget, my HP PhotoSmart 385 does the equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death every few minutes since I’ve loaded the new software that came with the OfficeJet Pro. It’s more like a burnt orange screen of death on the little LCD on the photo printer — it displays an error message then reboots itself every few minutes. For now, I’m keeping its USB cable disconnected until I need to print photos with it. Fortunately, it still prints between random reboots.
Let me bring this back to security software. Because I wanted to use my new printer on my home network, I knew this would be a slightly more complicated setup than a direct USB connection. But I’ve installed other network capable HPs before, so it wouldn’t be a big deal. But after wrestling with the software installation, which seemed to take forever, my PC just came to a grinding halt. My CPU utilization shot up and stayed near 100%, which is not a good thing for PC performance. Even simple things like system beeps were stuttering, and forget about playing anything back in iTunes or recorded video in the XP Media Center interface. It reminded me of those scenes from the Matrix movies, where the various characters would digitally “shiver” whenever something in the matrix was disturbed.
Now began the detective work.
A quick check of the task manager showed me why. A process called VSMON.EXE had gone ballistic. VSMON.EXE is a key component of my ZoneAlarm Pro 7.0 firewall software. Up until this point, I’ve been very happy with ZA Pro. I update it regularly, and when they made v7.0 available, I installed it seemingly with no problems. I use it in conjunction with avast! free anti-virus. I know there are probably better AV programs out there, but it seems to be doing just fine. To troubleshoot further, I backed up my ZA Pro settings, then I did a clean un-install and brought my PC back up. CPU utilization was back down where it should be. But I’m not exactly excited about running with just XP SP2 firewall. It’s just too risky.
Just for yucks, I reloaded ZA Pro again, to see how things would run. Overall, things ran slightly better, and CPU utilization wasn’t quite as bad, but I could still tell the PC was being taxed more than I think it should be. As best I could tell, it’s bad interaction with the new HP All-In-One software and Zone Alarm Pro. As an experiment, I may uninstall ZA Pro again, uninstall avast! and try my hand with Kaspersky Internet Security. I’ve read pretty good things about it. Of course, I know there is a school of thought out there that says to avoid using “suite” based software. And for the most part, I agree. I’ve had nothing but bad run-ins with various version of Internet Security Suites from the “Big 3″ in consumer PC protection: Symantec, Trend Micro and McAfee. I’ve had good luck using my “a la carte” security approach, up until now. If Kaspersky Internet Security doesn’t work they way I want it, I may still try using individual tools.
Which leads me to my next point — that the fact that we need to take such drastic measures to keep our PCs safe is tragic. It goes to show you how flawed mainstream operating systems are. What’s even more tragic is that most of the security solutions that exist penalize us as much as protect us. They drag down a PC’s performance for the sake of safety. I used to think this was an acceptable trade-off. But that when it makes your PC unusable, it’s no longer a compromise, it’s hostage-taking. It’s like when you walk into a mini mart or gas station anywhere near a high-crime area… the clerks are, more often than not, behind thick bulletproof glass with a drawer or revolving cylinder to interact with you. Or having burglar bars on the windows of your home. Either way, it takes away from how things should be.
Perhaps I just need to cook up a new solution for myself, one that will again achieve that fine balance I once had on my PC — security for performance. Ultimately, there is plenty of blame to go around. Microsoft for having such a flawed OS (they aren’t the only ones, but they are the biggest) that it requires so many additional security measures; security vendors for making software that is so hard to use, so complicated, and so performance sapping, all backed by support that is universally horrible (and expensive); and companies like HP that make software so bloated and complicated as to make it almost unusable. End users don’t escape the blame game, either. We can sometimes be our own worst enemy when it comes to security. We just want to buy and install a product that takes care of everything without us having to put forth any effort ourselves.
As to my next security cocktail, I would like to ask the Gnomie community for suggestions. What PC security tools do you utilize and how well do they work for you? Post away in the comments section!
[tags]antivirus, malware, security, computer safety[/tags]
11 Comments
Barry Heuring
May 1st, 2007
at 4:12pm
Matt:
I gave up on ZA a very long time ago. Replaced it with Agnitum Outpost firewall. Decided to try Sunbelt Kerio personal firewall for awhile because of price. Sunbelt Kerio just was not as easy and clean as Outpost.
I’m back using Outpost without any problems. Works great with OpenVPN (I could never get Kerio to work right with OpenVPN.) Highly recommend Outpost for a personal firewall.
marc klink
May 1st, 2007
at 4:32pm
I have never been disappointed with Sygate Personal Firewall, which was pulled from the Sygate site when Symantec [evil rat bastards] gobbled them up, but is still available on Simtel. For antivirus I use AVG Free, as it works well and doesn’t slow things down too much [less than any other I've tried...I did some fairly scientific testing on a k6-2-500 with 768MB memory so that the differences would be exaggerated]. I really don’t like the antispyware stuff available that uses a resident component, so I use the free product from Lavasoft, and common sense when surfing [with Opera 9.20 of course...Internet Exploder is to easily broken].
I, too, have just had one of those ‘why is this happening to me’ moments with the latest version of Window Blinds [5.5]. As a paid user, I downloaded my upgrade and after removing the previous version, rebooting, and installing 5.5, I found that my machine would stick at 100% CPU usage for 3-4 minutes after any changes in the skins. Also, I then realized that many of the themes would not apply correctly, reverting back to the ‘classic’ Windows theme, yet reporting that the theme shown in the window of the display properties screen was indeed installed. What a pain! After fighting with it, removing it, reinstalling twice more, I removed it yet again, reinstalled 5.1 and all is well again. So much for progress. I think that the changes made in the name of ‘Vista compatibility’ are what made it ‘XP incompatible’…and no other real benefits were touted. When a company makes a decision to move a product to another platform, they should at least be aware of the destruction it can cause.
Bryan Price
May 1st, 2007
at 5:36pm
“It should not take 45 freaking minutes to install the new printer software. ”
Yeah, I’ve ran into this. It takes forever to copy the data off the CD, AND THEN PROCEEDS TO UNCOMPRESS IT! Oh My God! The disk isn’t that full! And if you are taking more than 700megs of software to install (and I realize that this is a dual Mac/Windows CD), you’re really screwed.
And then when you think it might be done, it’s not!
Paul Morris
May 2nd, 2007
at 12:50am
I personally recommend NOD32 -it’s the best AV with little OS footprint - that I have used. I like Outpost but Comodo is very good F.W. too. I always found Sygate to be very good - and agree it was rotten of Symantec to gobble it up and take it from circulation.
Mike Nelson
May 2nd, 2007
at 2:28am
Avg free, Spybot, Spyblaster, Adaware, and Sygate are standard installs for my customers. AVG Spyware program (shareware) is good also as it is known to find stuff that none of the others do. It is worth the price.
AG
May 2nd, 2007
at 4:00am
I’ve been using ClamWin AV on my old laptop with considerable success. The computer is too old to run anything except ‘98 or Linux and the hard drive is too small for Linux.
http://www.clamwin.com/
AG
Randy Allen
May 2nd, 2007
at 7:07am
My first line of defense at work is use a Mac. Okay, not fair, but true. I have no anti-virus or anti-spyware running on it. On the PC I have to use, I just have Symantec Corporate AV and the Windows firewall, nothing else. My home PC, I play games or it would be a Mac, is the same. I use Firefox for the browser, so I don’t get all the junk I used to pick up with IE. Oh, and I am behind a Socicwall at work, and just the Linksys builtin router firewall at home, I am just not running a personal firewall other than Windows.
I do have to agree with you that it is a sorry state we are in with HP software. We have a HP Designjet with the worst driver package I have ever seen. The install, like many HP installs, was slow and didn’t work correctly the first time, then a call to HP was required to find out how to make it work on a PC. You have to check a box labeled “Auto Rotate” before you can choose the size of the paper roll. The “Roll” button doesn’t do this???? I love their printers, but hate their software.
Stan
May 2nd, 2007
at 9:47am
I’ve used a lot of the Norton stuff (Norton Commander and Norton Utilities etc) since way before they were bought out by Symantec sometime in the 90s. A lot more recently, I knew the Systemworks I’d been using slowed down my system, but it still worked nicely. Then (maybe 2 years ago?) I installed a new version and had problems up the kazoo.
I gave up on it, and went for AVG. I had no problems with it, but knew it was at or near the bottom in performance/ratings. I’ve also been using ZoneAlarm firewall, just about since it came out.
(Interesting note: I had big problems uninstalling the Norton. Even with their downloaded uninstall tool. I finally went through the registry and deleted every key that had Symantic, Norton, LiveUpdate and some others. Then I deleted all directories that had anything to do with the same. When it rebooted (actually it took 2 or 3) I thought I’d be dead, but it was an excellent fix. Everything worked as it should and my performance was back!)
I started out with the free ZA, then I saw I could get ZA Pro with a (almost) full rebate I went for it.
Then they introduced ZA Security Suite. Even though I wanted something better than AVG for my AV, I stayed away from it, as it used the lousy (I can’t remember the name) AV, and I didn’t want a bloated ’suite’. On top of which my ZA Pro and AVG were working nicely. Then a new ZA SS came out recently, that uses Kaspersky for the AV component.
I uninstalled AVG, and I bought ZASS with a full rebate, and installed it.
I have not had any problems since. It just works quietly in the background. The only thing I don’t like is sometimes the update or scan starts with the computer and I’d prefer it to start 5 or 10 minutes later (A recently new WinPatrol, which I also run, has a delayed start that I may try).
John Newton
May 2nd, 2007
at 2:05pm
HP is probably the worst company when it comes to loading CRAP on systems. I purchased an brand new laptop , Pavilion 9000 series, lovely haredware, but ti took me the better part of a day just to clean all the crap off of it including the Symantic stuff. I replaced the windows firewall witht eh Sunbealt firewall, and installed CounterSpy along with Panda’s AV package. So far the system works just fine, better in fact once I got all the preinstralled crap off of it.
To further make my point that HP is one of the worst when it comes to software, I too purchased an HP all-in-one unit for my wife and I to use with the desk top system. It took over 45 minutest o load all of the crap, and I do mean crap. All I need to do is print to the damn thing and once in a blue moon send or receive a fax. My desk top has slowed down and takes an addition minute or two now to boot. Tried to strip all of the crap out and the printer wouldn’t work. What the hell happened to a simple printer driver? I had to reload the software to get the printer to work again. Frustration seems to be the word of the day.
So, anyone out there have a good clean print driver for an HP Officejet 5600?
Philip C. Kimball
May 2nd, 2007
at 6:15pm
I also have noticed the massive chunk of software required to run an HP printer/scanner/copier, I am using the PSC 1350. It also frequently has to be uninstalled and reinstalled when it gets too difficult to use.
Several years ago, I paid a few cents for a program from V-com, called System Suite. I tried it and found it to be superior to Norton and McAfee. I have recently upgraded to the most recent version. Now I don’t even look for anything better. Almost every day I get new updates to the anti-virus definitions. It also has a firewall which seems to be a little bit slowing to the system, but seems to take care of any intruders or programs which try to access the internet. Check http://www.v-com.com
Philip
Teraforce
September 23rd, 2007
at 1:00pm
Wow! I’m having the EXACT same problems with my Photosmart 385 after I installed my Deskjet D4160 drivers!! Golden-yellow error screen every 10 minutes w/power icon and a lovely error code displayed, then reboots. Amber power light, card access lamp flashing rapidly Works fine between errors. USB cable was plugged in when this happened. I will have to run the printer without the USB cable plugged in for a while to see if this is really the case with mine.
Man, I thought my printer was dying after less than a month of ownership/use! I really don’t want to deal with ANY tech support, regardless of the company/mfgr.