Technology Tales

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TOPIC: MSCONFIG

Some things don't mix...

10th May 2009

Now that the Release Candidate for Windows 7 is out, I have been giving it a whirl in a VirtualBox session and it, like the Beta that I had been trying too, feels a sold enough affair. I went for the complete installation route in place of the upgrade path. I was surprised to find that it bundled my old files into a single folder called Windows_old and that my old user bits and bobs were folded in with this too. There was nothing there that I wouldn't have missed, but this is a nice touch.

However, I have a spot of fixing to do after adding Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. Like the beta, mixing Windows 7 and Kaspersky seems not to be the way to a stable system. Whether this is down to the virtualisation aspect of the business is something that I don't know, but I have found that removing Kaspersky and replacing it made everything sing along together. Booting into Safe Mode and using msconfig to remove any incidences of Kaspersky being called at start up provides a partial restoration of service. Because the msiexec service isn't running, you need full mode before any software but pulling out any cause for execution of Kaspersky gets that back. I suppose that I could go and put Windows 7 on a real machine to see if Kaspersky causes problems there, but that's not a road that I really want to travel.

A hog removed

11th February 2009

Even though my main home PC runs Ubuntu, I still keep a finger in the Windows world using VirtualBox virtual machines. I have one such VM running XP, and this became nigh on unusable due to the amount of background processing going on. Booting into safe mode and using msconfig to clear out extraneous services and programs running from system start time did help, yet I went one step further. Norton 360 (version 2 as it happened) was installed on their and inspection of Process Explorer revealed its hoggish inclinations and the fact that it locked down all of its processes to defend itself from the attentions of malware was no help either (I am never a fan of anything that takes control away from me). Removal turned out to be a lengthy process with some cancelling of processes to help it along, but all was much quieter following a reboot; the fidgeting had stopped. ZoneAlarm Pro (the free version that was gifted to users for one day only towards the end of 2008). Windows continues to complain about the lack of an antivirus application that it recognises, so resolving that is next on the to-do list.

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