virus protection using high CPUs

Don’t Worry About Me

February 6, 2015 — Pat Bertram

A night-long session with a technician from Trend Micro, the purveyor of my antivirus protection, wasn’t enough to fix the problem of the antivirus program with a high CPU usage. My computer is slow again today, and again, Trend Micro is eating all my CPUs.

Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days. I’m fine, just nursing an aged and ailing computer. (Seems to be my lot in recent years — nursing aged or ailing people and possessions.) I’m hoping to schedule another session with the technician soon, so they can find the problem.

When I find myself fretting over my slow slow slow computer, I remind myself that either things will work out or they won’t. I’ve already broken my streak of daily blogging, so it’s not as if it’s going to be a major problem if the machine is out of kilter for a while. Besides, a friend of mine discontinued her internet and gave away her computer and, except for a touch of nostalgia at what she used to be able to do, she seems to have suffered no ill effects. Apparently, there is life off line.

Well, of course I know that — it’s just that except for dancing, I’m not particularly fond of my current offline life. Too much to do: getting my father’s house prepared for sale, finishing my started projects, and packing my stuff. But then, if I didn’t spend three hours a day working on my blog, I’d have those hours to do what I had to do and probably wouldn’t still have all those things to do.

But don’t worry — I won’t be getting rid of the internet any time soon.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend, on or off line.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in culture, internet. Tags: high CPU usage, life offline, slow computer, virus protection using high CPUs. 4 Comments »

Did You Miss Me?

February 5, 2015 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday was the first day in three and a half years that I didn’t post a bloggery. Did you miss me?

My life has spiraled out of control. Oh, nothing really bad, just a lot of little things — getting estimates on housecleaners to clean the house, arranging for a carpet and tile cleaner, scheduling window cleaners and all the myriad jobs that have to be done in preparation for putting a house on the market. Most of the arrangements are being done by the executor, but because I am here on the premises, a lot devolves on me.

B Electronic world ut that’s not why I didn’t post yesterday. If it had been at all possible, I would have taken a few minutes out of my day just for the discipline of writing, even if it had been at 11:55 pm. But at the time, my computer was being controlled by some guy in India or maybe by then it was the fellow in the Philippines. I lost track.

My computer has been running very slowly. Although I accept that as the price for using an old computer (only in the electronic world is eight years considered old age. To me, this is still a new computer), it seemed strange that solitaire was running slowly too. I wasn’t going to do anything about it because, well . . . because solitaire isn’t the best use of my time, though it is relaxing. I did a system restore to before I noticed the problem, thinking that perhaps one of the updates I’ve downloaded was corrupt, but the computer was even slower. So I checked “processes” on the task manager and discovered that my antivirus software was using all my CPUs.

To make a long story short, after eight hours of their cleaning out my computers temp files (I knew there were three or four, but there must be at a dozen), after installing and reinstalling their software several times, after doing disc cleanups and disc scans for corrupt files, they finally managed to get their program to a workable usage of CPUs at about 3:30am. Way too late to make my blog date or to do anything at all actually except fall on the bed already half asleep.

My hunch is that the program interpreted a corrupt file as a virus and tried to delete it or sequester it, and it didn’t work, but who knows. None of the people who worked on my computer knew, either. So we’ll see how it goes.

And we’ll see if I get back in the mode of daily blogging, or I will use this breaking of routine as an excuse to forego the discipline.

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