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customer_is_alw
Former Member
Message 71 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Very sad to confirm this, but as can be verified by anyone here, after almost one month, no reply, no suggestions, no new upgrades from McAfee, capable to solve such problem, affecting indeed several McAfee users like me.

I'm also sure that McAfee surely have the know-how and the required skills and competence to easily remove and solve such problem: the mess is that such issue have probably been considered as not strategic, or not significantly interesting to them.

Even if I cannot share such policy, I can (economically speaking), understand it, but I believe like McAfee should take into account the possible impacts of such type of behaviour. 

My office XP based PC desktop (5 off) as also our laptop (3 off), are all affected by the same trouble, and nevertheless to tell, all of them are fitted with McAfee Total Protection Suite, a product ensured as compatible for use with XP platform.

Facts, as well know, are not confirming this, as all of our XP systems are drammatically damaged by the latest update.

We are experiencing delay and objective troubles at work, and this is starting to cause us economical damages and loss

In my opinion, by the above picture, and by the third parties software I mentioned by my previous message, it have been provided enough and clear evidences of the abnormal, not justified, not explained, not corrected, not optimized polling on all drives: indeed it seems like McAfee have something better to do than clear such issue, but facts confirms that all of our PC have been "fired out" by the latest upgrade.

I'm not going to pursue further such route, as in my opinion, McAfee have had enough opportunities to clear such problem. The sole evidence to me is that simply they are not interested in solving such issue.

By the actual scenario, should be enough evidences to demonstrate, under any circumstance, within any dispute context, that such fault have been caused by McAfee upgrade, as the promised performance have been missed, as such upgrade, even considering it may protect our XP based PC, "de facto" it have completely inhibit their typical performances, so this, indeed do not appears to me like a "XP compatible software upgrade".

In any case, I would not add further economical loss in pursuing any further action that law may grant to me, as I lost enough, also considering all the rest of troubles I continuosly experienced in the past years, wasting a lot of my well paid time, in attempting to solve something that  penalizes our XP machines.

Contractually talking, in fact, the Total Protection 2013 Suite CD rom carton envelope (P/N MTP13IMB3RAA), quotes that XP will be compatible with such release, and this is "de facto" a written contract, a performance warranty.  Unfortunatelly we all here know that this "deliverable" have not been maintained indeed.

Our PC are not longer useable with reasonable operating "dead time". They go somewhere and they are back after several minutes. This is indeed not acceptable, also being the more reasonable and patient guy in the world.

I'm still here to see if any McAfee software engineer will take care of our problem, but I'm almost sure that  at this point, no one will come to help us. This is indeed very sad, especially considering what McAfee name have been.

I don't know yet how I may clear such new trouble, but one thing I know for sure.

I will not longer renew anything more with McAfee.   Unfortunatelly, I'm also a little bit vindictive, so I'm pleased to say that after such trouble, I will never buy in the future any other product from McAfee, even considering the possibility they may  remain the latest softwarehouse capable to deliver protection software: if this will be indeed the case, I will instead prefer to smash all of my PC with a big hammer, and I will start back to use pen and ink. 

Such behavior may not be considered as a true progress or the necessary sacrifice in introducing the latest technologies.

Our issues have been on day by the other, instead than being a long and progressive deterioration process. This may be the further evidence that such upgrade have been not tested enough on an XP SP3 instead.

This more appears to me like to evade its contractual obligations, in providing a safe and efficient protection software as promised.

With all the best from Italy

Greetings

Steve


P.S. @ Hayton

even if I understand your position of moderator, I would suggest you to do not attempt to defend a fault, calling for faults from others (someone told us to do not look for mote in our brother's eye, instead to look for the beam in our): this is never a good strategy, expecially considering that the "others" are a relatively younger and less blazoned company (if I'm correct their first significant worldwide know product was in 2009) , as also their most comparable products are list priced 45 to 55 % less than the Total Protection Suite 2013 (prior than any discount), sorrowfully in my office cabinet: I was on fact trusting to have placed my PC in safe and capable hands.

exbrit
MVP
MVP
Message 72 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

I'm still here to see if any McAfee software engineer will take care of our problem, but I'm almost sure that  at this point, no one will come to help us. This is indeed very sad, especially considering what McAfee name have been.

This is not Technical Support, this is user-to-user support based on personal experience, with maybe an occasional visit from a support person if we are lucky.

If you want Technical Support it is available free of charge by phone or online chat and linked under Useful Links at the top of this page.

We Moderators have discussed this issue and we can't reproduce it using the latest software versions so your best chances would be through Technical Support.

.

Message was edited by: Ex_Brit on 09/04/14 8:42:59 EDT PM
psfales
Former Member
Message 73 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

And, just to keep beating on this dead horse, the machine which we were planning to discard as useless is  back to normal after all McAfee software was removed.

Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 74 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

customer_is_always_right wrote:

P.S. @ Hayton

even if I understand your position of moderator, I would suggest you to do not attempt to defend a fault, calling for faults from others (someone told us to do not look for mote in our brother's eye, instead to look for the beam in our): this is never a good strategy, expecially considering that the "others" are a relatively younger and less blazoned company (if I'm correct their first significant worldwide know product was in 2009) , as also their most comparable products are list priced 45 to 55 % less than the Total Protection Suite 2013 (prior than any discount), sorrowfully in my office cabinet: I was on fact trusting to have placed my PC in safe and capable hands.

Far from "defending a fault" I have been trying to understand its cause, and in passing I noted that some of the symptoms have been seen before in another product. That implies that there is something in common between McAfee's program now and ESET's program then : a coding or design error perhaps. It is a pity that the earlier ESET-related discussions did not reach a conclusion about how to fix the observed problem.

Only someone from McAfee who has access to a lot of debugging and performance information from your machine will be able to tell you what exactly is going on. I do my best with the limited information I have, but many of these symptoms do not appear - or are nowhere near as severe - on my XP machine. I contribute to this discussion whenever I think I have something new to say, but there's no point in trying to answer questions about things I cannot replicate.

Peacekeeper
Message 75 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

I spent ages trying to fault my XP box after I disabled the floppy. I could not get it to open slowly. It did when the floppy was being accessed but everything quitened when this was disabled. This was on 12.8 version retail and a e6600 dual core cpu. Single core cpus will be slow with Mcafee maybe this bug made these worse.

That assumes your PCs are single cored if not something else is conflicting. On my daughter's PC it was malwarebytes trial of the full version that and full c drive indexing made he PC slow without a floppy. It improved after removing Malwarebytes and indexing and is fine now on win8.1.

What this says is check what programs are installed are there any other AVs/antimalware programs installed or not normal (widespread)programs. I am only fishing here as peter says support has the tools to check what is causing this for some users.

We mods will keep on support to get a fix.

BTW there is a fix in testing for the floppy issue it works so it did at least on my PC.

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 10/04/14 7:12:00 PM
mjminer
Contributor
Message 76 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Hi psfales,

========

You raised an interesting issue.

You mentioned that you bought a new machine, and the problem appeared upon installing McAfee.

Didn't that new machine come with a new OS (e.g., win 8)?

My understanding is that this problem affected only an environment running both Windows XP and McAfee.

Are you saying it is more widespread than just WIndows XP?

Hayton,

======

in item 69, you pointed out that cpu activity was minimal. And you are taking that to mean all-ok. Not.

I also had minimal CPU utilization. That's what confused me.

However, if I tapped the Win-E keystroke (to start the Windows Explorer), instead of popping up instantly, it took well over a minute (with nothing else on the machine except task manager, and it showing minimal CPU activity). That's why I didn't understand why things were running so slow - there seemed to be plenty of CPU available, the hard drive light was barely on (essentially idle). So, what resource was constrained?

(BTW, I am using WinExplorer as an example, the same problem affected Ctrl-Shift-Esc to start task manager, clicking through to start notepad and calculator, and anything else I tried.)

In item 73 - a fascinating piece, btw, I enjoyed learning from it, you gave me a thought -

What if McAfee is doing a "synchronous read" (or synchronous access) to the floppy drive?

Read, wait for it to finish, waiting, waiting, ... a half second or so.   OK.done, on to the next disk.

Disk goes "instantly", and ...

Back to access the floppy... We're waiting... we're waiting... a half second or so.

OK, done, read hard disk (by comparison, nearly instant).

And back to floppy for a half second...

...

If all activity is queued o a single queue, and some winds up behind floppy activity. the system would starve during program load because on-access scans would be delayed by floppy activity.

This actually explains everything - the low CPU usage, but also the abysmal performance.

I unplugged the diskette, both data and power connectors. No difference.

That should have prevented it from even trying to access the floppy. But, maybe it tries anyway. Waits for the error, and retries (synchronously).

I can't recall whether I checked CPU utilization here, but I know I checked performance - Win-E to start Windows Explorer. Still abysmal.

I didn't go so far as to remove the floppy from device manager. Maybe that would have been different...

Peacekeeper

===========

Can you share the details about the floppy fix? What did they change? Does it fix the performance issue?

I don't mean what modules, I mean more of the logic of the change - a different way to access the drive? Not accessing it at all? etc.

(I'm curious.)

McAfee, and moderaors, re: recreating problem:

=====================================

I formatted a drive, installed Win XP sp2, worked for several hours to get it up to sp3 - all the latest updates.

I installed McAfee as my first non-updates install, and the Performance problem and Diskette chatter began.

I uninstalled McAfee, and both problems went away.

On a Dell Dimension Gen 3.

While I didn't understand it at the time, ProcMon showed the activity described earlier (Hayton, 73) in terms of activity.

If I'd understood to decode the activity, I might have figured out it was the floppy from mcshield.exe at the beginning of this exercise.

(Thanks again, Hayton, good stuff to know.)

Peacekeeper
Message 77 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Re fix sorry no we were given it to test it needs QAing and adding to the next(or later) update before everyone gets it. It was an proof of concept test to see if they could find a fix.

Seems you proved it has nothing to do with installed programs.  Have you got any card readers installed ie hardware ones? I see from your previous posts disabling the floppy did not help teh speed. It did for me.

Hayton
Reliable Contributor
Reliable Contributor
Message 78 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

No time to go into this tonight, but I have a gut feeling it's something to do with this -

Reparse points can contain data that instructs the file system or the operating system to take special actions

It's low-level, as I said. "File system or operating system" implies that the "special actions" need to be tailored to a specific OS and file system (NTFS). I'll have to dig a little to see if Windows 7 and XP have any differences in the way the file system is handled. Trouble is, the Microsoft documentation is not just compendious, it's overwhelming when you get down to that technical level.

Edit - synchronous disk access : interesting idea. I wouldn't have thought so, but you never know.

I say again, I fixed the floppy drive chatter all by myself when it appeared, but I don't know what it was that I did that fixed it - reboots, system restore, chkdsk, defrag, purging temp files and other stuff, malware scan - all I know is after two reboots the noise went away and hasn't come back. . Very annoying.

Message was edited by: Hayton on 10/04/14 06:10:36 IST
customer_is_alw
Former Member
Message 79 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

@ Ex_Brit ---------------------------------

I appreciate your comments, even if I promised myself to do not longer use the Technical Support.

You have your good reasons, I've mine, spread over decades of using McAfee, and loads of such time wasting contacts, asking to un-install, and then re-install, running also the famous Virtual Technician.

I had not time in the past to report all of these, as indeed time wasting, but now, I'm indeed very disappointed and angry, so I decide to allocate some of my time to report this latest big bug, that is causing us objectively, the "not use" of our XP machines: terrible latencies, delayed processing, ages to start with Explorer navigation, aeons to download the e-mails (I noted in fact that any time you start any application or you attempt to connect to anything else, either on the local ethernet, or on the web, all the floppy disk croak increase in frequency of polling and systems performances collapses.

I'm not criticizing such forms of support, against to simply report what have been: I've no time to play so much with mentioned tools, as I use my PC to work and when I paid for McAfee products, I was only hoping to be allowed to work without worries, but this has not been.

In any case, to close, positively, with your intervention, I wish to remind you a couple of things.

I trust like I provided wide evidences of troubles originated by McAfee (may be you have not read earlier message traffic).  I would also remind that still by such traffic, I would consider myself, almost as a skilled PC user.

What I meant, is that on the basis of our 5 desktop XP machines, with the addition of the further 3 laptop XP machines we have (all HP and Compaq PC, but different models), all starting to have the same troubles, all originated in the same time period, all after the automated updates, without having being performed any change over such XP machines (no un-install of existing softwares, no install of new software, nothing different from what me made over the past 9 months, or more, as these are all "old" machines, and we do not  wish to cause registers updates, as we would not worse their almost poor performances), it would be a very hard matter to be justified by something requiring to evaluate "logs", or to be addressed to the microprocessor architecture (single or dual cores): this is indeed a clear evidence of something wrong on McAfee side, on not on our river side.

Where this it would be still considered as a "personal" trouble we experienced (but is very clear that such theory cannot be supported anymore), please try to review the other community members message here.

You have been also told by other McAfee customers, that removing McAfee, such troubles disappear.

What else you need to understand that this one is not a "local" machine issue, despite may be a not considered XP limitation or missed compatibility trouble originated by such insane overnight upgrade?

I was trusting that a community forum should be a good place to talk about how to clear such issue (otherwise tell me please which would be the reason of such forum existence): in any case, many thanks so much for your help, as this convinced me further, that I'm doing well in leaving from McAfee.


@ Hayton ----------------------------

Many thanks for your additional comments.

In any case, avoiding to continue on such "not productive" route, I would just point out, that such similar "ESET event" originally been in 2011, and now repeated by another softwarehouse within a different time context, should furthermore confirms to all of us, that indeed this time it have been "touch" something wrong in the XP system. Unfortunatelly, as it probably was for ESET, this may be indeed "efforts expensive" so I'm almost sure that no one will clear such issue, exactly as it have been in 2011 similar ESET bug.

But once again, in my opinion, this would be another good evidence that is not a matter of logs here.

I would instead thank you so much indeed in thinking that the "reparse" and the rest of actions I mentioned earlier, could be a good starting point to go further and to dig more deep, in attempting to understand and fix such trouble. Unfortunatelly, I'm almost sure that McAfee will not pursue such route.

@ Peacekeeper -----------------

Many thanks for your comments about the possible floppy fix, even if by your latest reply to mjminer, we have clear now, that no fix is coming, as still well within the "conceptual" environment.

Sitting now on 3 paperweight and 5 door stops, with real trouble in day by day work that no one will clear to us, I leave greetings to all here with all the best from Italy

Steve

Peacekeeper
Message 80 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Steve They are too big for paper weights.

Sorry trying to be light hearted.

The fix will come I just got the first attempt to fix it to test and now they need to build it into the program and QA it to see that it does not do worse things.

Since Mjminer ran a new OS install and added Mcafee  it appears to clash with some thing in the OS or hardware. ! users noticed that disabling his external card reader fixed his issue. Not saying this is the answer just adding the thought.

Me I chickened out and upgraded both XP boxes to win8.1. They run smooth though they were doing so anyway. I do have a backup of the XP install so will backup teh win 6 install and go back to XP when Mcafee needs more testing.

I have restirred the pot re these issues.

OH if you have not contacted support do so posting here does not show up on their list of issues so gets less priority the more calling in the better. If they suggest reinstalling tell them that has been tried and issue is a known isue so ask them to log the  issue and if you want ask them to escalate the issue to a higher tech. Not that the latter will help unless you are willing to provide logs etc but it is 1 option.

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 10/04/14 7:49:50 PM

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 10/04/14 9:51:18 PM
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