Disabling mcafee???

[attgig]

so, I got a laptop from my company, and it has mcafee. it just eats up cpu time scanning every single little thing going on. However, I can't disable it. they have all the things greyed out:

http://www.attgig.com/pictures/grey.JPG

anyone know of a way to get it ungrey-ed so that I can disable scanning?

TIA.

[Jeffbx]

Find one of the IT guys & explain how your machine is immune to viruses, and he'll certainly give you the password to disable it.

Serious word of advice - we caught a guy who did this after he managed to introduce a pretty serious virus into our office & also passed it on to some of our customers. His a** was in a sling for quite some time after that.

So, convince IT to do it for you if it's causing performance issues on your machine. At least that way it's their fault if something goes wrong.

[SmokeyDP]

If set up properly it shouldn't require that much CPU if we are talking about a newer laptop. Purhaps something is set up wrong with it? Either way, I would talk to IT like Jeff said.

[bbrian]

They probably have your mcafee setup like the moron security team here has ours setup.. which is to scan every file regardless if it is executable or could contain executable code/script. My laptop is completely worthless because of it. It scans every file on access.. period.

They also brilliantly setup a scheduled task to do a full system scan at 11:45am every tuesday. My laptop is SOOO slow that this stupid task doesn't complete until noon on wed. I call the task stupid, because they could set it for Friday night at midnight, or to run when the system is idle, but no, it has to run in the middle of the day when I'm trying to freakin work.

I'm all for security, but this is rediculous..

When I'm doing a task that would normally complete in a few hours, but takes days because of virus-scan, I stop and disable the mcafee services in the control panel. Normally I would just stop the service, however they also have WMI scripts that scan our machines and restart the services if they are stopped. Disabling it keeps that from being an issue.

Good luck.

[xcgames]

haha I just copied down the important stuff on the company machine, including network settings, and reformmated. Excuse: more work done on time = more profit for the company. Network admin only came to set up some VPN stuff, never put AV on it again. It was a norton corporate edition and i don't know how many companies are paying dearly every minute for these slow performing/little use programs.

[SmokeyDP]

Not running an antivirus is just asking for trouble on a corporate network...

I have Norton Corporate Edition on every computer I use and I do not notice a slow down. Its all about setting it up properly....

[attgig]

exactly, and it's not set up properly. pisses me off. and I'm totally willing to run a scan nightly at 2 am before i go to work so that it doesn't corrupt anything, but what's killing me is I'm trying to open a word doc, and it takes 30 seconds for a onepage doc to open. it takes 30 seconds for me to open a new IE explorer window. it takes 30 seconds for explorer to respond after I hit alt-v.

it's ridiculous. it scans every single thing once I'm on a network outside of work. piss me off.

[SmokeyDP]

Sounds like something else is wrong with that thing besides the AV... Even if it was scanning EVERY FILE it should not take that long unless you are using a Pentium II or something along those lines. Have your IT department look at it.

[attgig]

the thing is, I plug it into the network at work...it's fine.
i have it unplugged... it's fine.
that's all i can think of.... any other ideas? oh, and do you really think IT dept's at large corporations really know what they're doing? :P

[Jeffbx]

haha I just copied down the important stuff on the company machine, including network settings, and reformmated. Excuse: more work done on time = more profit for the company. Network admin only came to set up some VPN stuff, never put AV on it again. It was a norton corporate edition and i don't know how many companies are paying dearly every minute for these slow performing/little use programs.


People please listen:

As an IT manager for a software dev company, I'll give you the scoop on why IT does stupid things like this.

A single virus introduced into a corporate environment can spread to the entire network in a matter of minutes. Depending on the virus, at the least it will tie up network traffic & prevent people from doing their work until IT cleans it up. Worst case, it will start deleting data & incapacitating machines. I've seen both cases. The biggest risk to a company are laptops that people take outside of the building & then back in.

All it takes is one moron (no offense intended xcgames, just picking on your post) who thinks the extra few seconds he's saving is worth putting the company at risk of losing tons of money. I don't know about your companies, but at my office we estimate dowtime costs about $15k per hour, and we're not that large of an organization. That's over $100,000 for one day of downtime.

ATT, sounds like you may have performance issues because of the scanner - have you talked to the IT guys about it? We're not all total tools - sometimes if you ask them, they'll be more than happy to sit down with you & have a look at the setup. If they're doing something wrong, they probably won't ever fix it if they don't know it's causing problems. If the setup is what it is and they're not going to change it, they will probably explain why. For example, at one company I worked for we had a security manager who was slightly bi-polar, I think. He locked things down TOO tightly & it caused all sorts of problems. The IT team couldn't do anything about it because they were just doing what they were told to do. Once everyone started complaining about this guy, upper management had to take a look at what he was doing & things got fixed.

Bottom line:

Tools like virus scanners & firewalls are there for a reason. If they're getting in the way of you doing your job, talk to IT or complain to your management. I'll guarantee you one thing - if you take matters into your own hands & the network or other machines take a hit because of it, your job WILL be in jeopardy. If you go through the proper channels, maybe you can get them to solve your problem, maybe you can't, but at least you're not putting your job or your co-worker's data at risk.

[SmokeyDP]

Sounds like something else is wrong with that thing besides the AV... Even if it was scanning EVERY FILE it should not take that long unless you are using a Pentium II or something along those lines. Have your IT department look at it.
I just double checked. I am running Norton Antivirus Corporate on a 650mhz PIII and it is setup to scan EVERY file and it does not noticeably slow down the computer at all. I don't know if McAfee is any different though.

Jeffbx: Nice post, well thought out and written.

[brainsmile]

quit

[bbrian]

I just double checked. I am running Norton Antivirus Corporate on a 650mhz PIII and it is setup to scan EVERY file and it does not noticeably slow down the computer at all. I don't know if McAfee is any different though.


My workstation is set the same way (mcafee though) and doesn't cause any noticeable performance problems.. my laptop is a different story. The primary difference is the laptop is a 4,500 rpm dirve and the workstation is a 7,200 rpm drive.

Good post jeffbx and I agree with all of it.. However, I do wish that security teams/mgmt would also analyze the cost of the lost productivity due to performance degredation. There should be a balance between security and useability.

Next year we are getting new systems and it shouldn't be much of an issue anymore.

[Jeffbx]

There should be a balance between security and useability.


I agree with this 100% - that's why you need to complain to IT or to your management if security is screwing up your productivity. In my company, security rules are set by our corporate parent, and some of those rules are overkill. With enough complaints, we were able to get rid of most of the stupid ones.