My computer is running slow - Is it NOD32s fault?

Xophile,

Can you check whether you have Perfect Disk from Raxco installed on your machine? You have a file running called PDSched.exe which could be a legitimate file from Perfect Disk or it could be a sneaky worm.

Bandicoot.

 

Bandicoot:

Yes, I have Perfect disc installed and I run it once or twice every week.

I talked to the swedish support-team today on the phone and they told me I could trust you Bandicoot

They asked me to disable everything under "additional options on create" in AMON without any worries at all. When I do that everything runs very well. That's also what I found out myself a few days ago, if I leave all of them enabled except for runtime packers it works great. Immediately when I enable runtime packers it's slow as hell again...

Should I leave it at that and be happy or do you have any other suggestions/ideas?

Thanks again!

PS. Hope you day off in LA was good. I've been there myself once, crazy city!

 

They said you could trust me?!! Fuuuu.... I'm not sure about that Xophile.

Disabling all, or some "additional options on create" seems to get around your issue but doesn't seem like the ideal answer.

I believe Perfect Disk can be set to automatically defragment your HD. In which case, AMON might be chasing it around all over the place, all day long. Can you a) watch AMON's window when Perfect Disk is running and b) try disabling Perfect Disk?

Bandicoot.

PS - Yes, had a great time in LA thanks.

 

Ok, here's another update on the issue

I tried running Perfect Disk and watching AMON at the same time, everything looked perfectly fine. I then tried to stop both perfect disk services but still that didn't help. I uninstalled it completely and rebooted but that didn't help either so it shouldn't be Perfect Disk's fault.

I decided to record my issue for your viewing pleasure and you can find it here as a flash file (it's about 48 seconds long):

http://hem.bredband.net/matola/

Hope to hear back from you soon!

/Matt

 

Anything new?

 

Hello Xophile,

Sorry for delay in responding. Are you using a Runtime Packer program to archive your executables on your machine? (Programs like PKLite, UPX, LZExe, AsPack, Neolite, etc.) AMON will have to unpack any such files before scanning them and then re-pack them, so if you have a lot of such files on your system there could be a noticeable difference in AMON's speed, and also disabling the scanning of Runtime Packers will speed everything back up again.... which you have already proved.

Can you try this experiment: Setup 2 sub-directories on your root directory (A & B). Put a bunch of files in directory A (a variety, since you said that this issue is relative to all types of files). Exclude directories A & B from AMON's scanning. Now copy the files from A to B. Is the speed "normal" or is it still slow? It should be "normal" even if the scanning of Runtime Packers is enabled. If it's slow, then there must another issue causing the slowdown, like there's another scanner running on your machine somewhere.

Bandicoot.

 

I don't have any runtime packer rpograms installed and have never, ever used one

I tried your tip it now and the speed is there both with AMON on and off. The speed doesn't change even if I exclude those directories. This issue is really strange I might say.

Did you watch my "movie" by the way?

It seems this only happens when something is installing on my machine. Like when the .dll files are registered or something like that.

Please respond when you get the time!

/Matt

 

Hi Xophile,

Yes, I watched your 'movie' (good work, BTW). The thing is, many installation packages will have runtime packed files inside them, so during the opening of the installation package, you will often see a slight slow down while AMON is unpacking, scanning and re-packing again. The difference in time on the installation in your movie was from 2 and a half seconds to 11 seconds. To my mind mind this is not a serious problem. But if any larger processes were taking 4 or 5 time longer, then I can understand that could be annoying.

I thought you said originally that this slow down happened whenever you moved, opened, copied files... not just on installations. That's why I asked you to run the test.

Bandicoot.

 

you can turn NOD off or even uninstall it and try your hardrive tach again to see if there is a link at all... I can't imagine there is, but that should tell you.

did you do any windows updates to your Hardrive controller drivers?.. that may have slowed things?

 

Also, nod32 has that optimized scanning enabled. It's not going to scan those .dlls twice.