Tina Norris Fields
tinanfields at torchlake.com
Thu Mar 12 06:56:04 CDT 2009
John, Thanks so much for your continuing help and generosity of spirit. Vipre is an excellent product and I will continue to use it. By the end of last Saturday I was exhausted and very frustrated over the loss of a whole day's work time. After a good night's sleep, I took care of Dad's computer in a flash. He has very little experience with the issues of security that we in this group take in stride, so his first question to me was "What do you think about Avast? Should I switch to that?" I said that every security product has glitches come along, and I acknowledged that this glitch was serious, but I tried to show that I still have more confidence in Vipre than in any of the other products out there. T John Bartow wrote: > Hi Steve, > Sorry to see you had problems. Did you try to contact Sunbelt technical > support? They have a technical support phone numbers (yes, you can actually > talk to them) and a chat directly on their web page. Used to irritate me > because it floated around. (I haven't noticed if they parked the thing or > not but I complained loudly about the floating bit.) > > Valid beef - I think this may be what happened to Tina also, who I tried (in > vain) to help through this issue. I thought it was related to the 5019 issue > (see below) but it wasn't. The next day I found out about the Thunderbird > issue but it was too late to help by then. > > This is a known issue that recently came about. Vipre was causing high CPU > usage when using Thunderbird. Sunbelt released a fix about 3 hours after the > issue became known. > > Every security product is going to have issues. The main difference for me > (besides being a better product than the others ;o) is that Sunbelt support > actually will let you call them and for their enterprise products they have > forums where you can participate and get real answers. They do have consumer > forums but they were based on a third party forum site and they are > revamping their support site so that everything is all in one place. > > Just to let you know a bit about what's going on in the Vipre world - > Sunbelt released a couple of new technologies to combat the constantly > evolving malware threats (like AntiVirusXP2009). > This interview is a pretty good read (although it seems to be a bit too > verbatim at times). (Drew and some of you that are interested in > virtualization would probably like to read this.) > http://www.h-online.com/security/New-VIPRE-fangs-An-interview-with-Sunbelt-C > EO-Alex-Eckelberry--/features/112535/0 > > 5019 Issue: > When Sunbelt released the MX-V technology last month (via update 5019) it > created havoc in a couple of enterprise situations. They had actually sent > out a notice to all enterprise customers and resellers that they were going > to do this and that everyone should be aware that the update for this would > be larger than normal and hence take more bandwidth than normal. Normally, > Vipre updates are purposely kept to a small size, one thing we like in an > enterprise environment (versus the McAfee Super-dats at over 100MB a crack). > Things went fairly bad on a couple of sites (6000 plus clients on a network > can use up some bandwidth). I was reading the Vipre list pretty thoroughly > as I didn't want any of clients to suffer network stoppages because of this > and I was fairly surprised at the eventual outcome of these tense > situations. (One of my clients suffered one issue, fairly minor, Oracle.exe > was prevented from starting on reboot. I didn't even know they had Oracle - > it's a background process for another product that I didn't install. Added > it to the admin known good apps and all is well.) After all was said and > done, the network/security admins all praised Sunbelt for their constant > communication and support throughout the problem. Even though this had > basically interrupted their business, these people PRAISED Sunbelt for how > they handled it because of their past horrific experiences with other > enterprise security vendors such as Symantec, McAfee, Trend, etc. I was a > bit shocked. These were the same people who a day or two earlier were ready > to hang Sunbelt staff for their sins. I guess the reality is that this is a > field wrought with problems and live support is the key to success. > > After everything was back to normal the CEO of Sunbelt actually emailed a > letter of apology for the problems and listing a series of items they were > going to implement internally so that it would never happen again. In other > words they actually listen to their customer base. I wish I could find the > letter. I would forward it. Unfortunately I delete Vipre Enterprise list > emails as there is an online archive of it and I have yet to find the letter > in the archives. > > I rarely think about CEO's of large companies but I think if I were to be > one, this is how I would do it. If you read the interview above - he evens > talks like me ;o) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com > [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach > Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 8:29 AM > To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues > Subject: [dba-Tech] Interesting Vipre behavior > > Dear Group, > > I've used Vipre for a few months on my system (Windows XP x64) and on > my wife's XP system. Didn't have any problems ... until a couple of > days at the end of last week. > > After what I'm about to describe happened a couple of times, I started > out after a fresh reboot by running SysInternals' Process Explorer > showing the Performance Graph for the SBAMSvc.exe service. > > Then I'd start Thunderbird. The performance graph for the Vipre > service would jump up to 50% CPU utilization (most of that was core > CPU). Then, after email was downloaded, I'd click on any message to > read it and the CPU utilization would jump to 100%. Most of that CPU > utilization (about 70%) was core CPU. > > The CPU utilization stayed at 100% so I thought I'd shut down the > service using Process Explorer. After having accomplished that and > seeing the CPU utilization plunge back to 0, I tried re-starting > Vipre; that is, I ran it from the Start menu instead of going into > Services and re-starting it from there. Three times this happened: > complete system freeze. No mouse, no keyboard, no disk activity...so > I hit the power switch. > > After a couple days of this, I started my system back up and ran > Process Explorer and whatever else I run normally...and everything's > fine! I didn't un-install anything; I didn't change anything in the > startup programs...Vipre just started working as it's supposed to. > > I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 MHz system w/8 GB of RAM. > > My wife's system (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 w/2 GB of RAM) has a > different problem. She's got more disk space than I do...about 1300 > GB, so a Vipre scan takes longer. But on Feb.26 her Deep scan ran for > 291 minutes. That jumped to 459, 463, 470, and 463 minutes on March > 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Then on March 6th it jumped to 1092 minutes! > (For what it's worth, my 244 minute scan on March 5th jumped to 488 > minutes on March 6th for 500 MB of storage space). > > Yesterday morning I woke up real early and saw that her Deep scan was > projected to take about 1100 minutes so I cancelled it. I then set > the nightly scan to be a Quick scan, which took about 2-3 minutes. > > I'm mainly venting and I'm happy that my system has settled down...but > I'd like my wife's system to run Deep scans at night that don't last > for 18 hours...and I don't know what to do about it. > > Regards, > > Steve Erbach > Neenah, WI > http://www.NeenahPolitics.com > http://www.TheTownCrank.com > _______________________________________________ > dba-Tech mailing list > dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > > _______________________________________________ > dba-Tech mailing list > dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > >