My father in law has a Dell that came pre-loaded with Mcafee SecurityCenter for the AV solution. Recently I've noticed that his HDD is having a lot of activity, so I downloaded ProcMon to see what was going on. One of Mcafee's processes [mcshield.exe] is doing a lot of reading, and sometimes a little bit of writing to the hdd. The problem is, quite often there's enough activity going on that it slows down general usage of the computer. I logged into safe mode and ran a full slew of things like Spybot, AdAware 2008, and Mcafee's system scan. There wasn't anything overly malicious going on, just the normal tracking cookies that are fairly often picked up. At the least amount of activity, his hdd activity light blinks about once a second, which doesn't noticeably effect performance. Sometimes though, the activity light doesn't go off, and performance seriously suffers.
I don't know if it's related to the Mcafee processes, but occasionally Explorer.exe will do a large amount of reading and writing to the drive as well. I've noticed the intel graphics drivers cause a little bit of activity from time to time too. Now, I don't want to spend 4 hours working on this issue, but If possible I'd like to get it solved because my father in law is the kind of guy that will just toss this computer out and buy a new one rather than deal with the hassle. It's a perfectly good computer, especially since all he does is internet/ebay and digital picture storage. I know Mcafee is a bloated AV solution, but I've never noticed it causing so much activity. Surely something's wrong?
I don't know if it's related to the Mcafee processes, but occasionally Explorer.exe will do a large amount of reading and writing to the drive as well. I've noticed the intel graphics drivers cause a little bit of activity from time to time too. Now, I don't want to spend 4 hours working on this issue, but If possible I'd like to get it solved because my father in law is the kind of guy that will just toss this computer out and buy a new one rather than deal with the hassle. It's a perfectly good computer, especially since all he does is internet/ebay and digital picture storage. I know Mcafee is a bloated AV solution, but I've never noticed it causing so much activity. Surely something's wrong?
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