Helpful Antivirus programs
Posted on December 17, 2005
4 Comments
Interesting situation at work recently.
In the past, a few of my co-workers have always grumbled/muttered about how slow the integration was between our editor of choice (Spider Writer) and Visual Source Safe(vss). Now, just to hold off the detractors: Yes, we realize VSS has some warts and not always a stellar reputation. But the price was right (already owned it) and we’re a small team. We don’t need anything too terribly fancy. It does the job. Just slowly for a couple of the guys. I’ve tried a few things in the past to see if I could speed them up, but it was always a bit of a puzzler.
Flash forward to this week: I have a reloaded laptop. All fresh and clean. And guess what? I have the same problem now — working with files in VSS is dreadfully slow from Spider Writer. Oh no! Suddenly, this problem becomes a lot more interesting to me.
And ya know? Since I reloaded my desktop PC, it hasn’t worked real well when accessing files from VSS at work either. I bet it suffers from the same problem.
I sent off an email to the folks at Actipro to see if they had any ideas. Nope, they’d never heard of such a thing, but suggested I do a google search on “Slow VSS”. At first, I was a bit put off by the response, but then I did the search. Oh my… lots of people with similar problems. And a common response: Turn off your Antivirus’s real time protection for the directories that have your code.
Ah ha. Eureka moment. Lightbulb. etc.
Turned off McAfee on my home machine and suddenly Spider Writer can now access VSS files from work.
Side note here: McAfee Antivirus does not allow you to exclude directories or file extensions. How incredibly lame is that?!? It won’t be on my home machine much longer, that’s just stupid.
Excluded my code directories from within Symantec AV on my work laptop. Now, from home, I can work with VSS and Spider Writer. I think I whooped the problem, but need to get to the office for some more testing. That can probably wait until Monday though.
So what was the big deal? Well on both of my machines, I recently changed AV products. Both used to use AVG products (one the free home version and one the Pro version). At home I decided to try McAfee since it was free. For work I switched to Symantec since that’s what we had a site license for.
I’m sure there’s a moral in all this somewhere.
Tags: antivirus, avg, mcafee, symantec, vss
Possibly Related Posts
Comments
4 Responses to “Helpful Antivirus programs”
Leave a Reply
So, without giving me a link to the differences, I know that already, what differences, as a user have you noticed between the free and paid for versions of AVG? I’m using the free version now and am mostly OK with it.
Not any real major differences. Couple of reasons I bought the license:
1) Pro/paid version allows me to exclude directories from scanning and real-time protection
2) Wanted to “give a little back” since I’ve installed so many free versions over the years.
to elaborate on point 1: That was critical a while back with running a few MMORPG game clients… And, now as we learned this week, critical to my VSS integration.