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mjminer
Contributor
Message 81 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Peacekeeper

==========

No card readers or anything like that. Base machine.

I mentioned that I disconnected the drive as part of one test, and that I did not remove it from Device Manager.

I am pretty sure that I did not disable it from the Bios (tried a bunch of things, but, not that, as I recall). So, maybe it still existed in the Bios, and so was still "checked" by McAfee, even though the floppy itself was completely disconnected (I am positive about disconnecting.).

#84: What does "OD" mean?

Hayton

======

"Noise went away" (#82)

Curiosity - does the drive still work?

Do you have the performance issue?

exbrit
MVP
MVP
Message 82 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

customer_is_always_right wrote in part:

@ 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.

etc.


Well unfortunately we are only customers like yourself and really don't have time to read every single post here, especially ones that are long and protracted, as we have many other duties that may not be obvious to the average user  here and as we are volunteers, can't spend all day here.  Technical Support IS support, we are merely here to offer advice if we can and direct people to the proper support channels.

.

Message was edited by: Ex_Brit on 10/04/14 6:35:43 EDT AM
psfales
Former Member
Message 83 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Sorry - I should have made that clear - We are a small outfit with no money (a small church), so the "new" machine is actually a used machine running Windows XP SP3.   The machine gun floppy started up the day McAfee was installed and returned to normal when it was removed.

Peacekeeper
Message 84 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Reconnect and disable it in the bios or device manager. Should not be an issue but at least you will be teh same as me (I disabled it) and saw no slowness.

OD = bad typing =OS (Operating System)

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 10/04/14 9:54:45 PM
mjminer
Contributor
Message 85 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Yeah, not going to happen.

I'm participating to help solve the problem - I appreciate when someone else helps me with mine; I'm following the puzzle because I am curious; but, sorry, no longer affected by what McAfee does.  🙂

customer_is_alw
Former Member
Message 86 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

@ Ex_Brit

just quoting your latest written effort:


Well unfortunately we are only customers like yourself and really don't have time to read every single post here, especially ones that are long and protracted, as we have many other duties that may not be obvious to the average user  here and as we are volunteers, can't spend all day here.  Technical Support IS support, we are merely here to offer advice if we can and direct people to the proper support channels.



Please review also my previous message, as I believe like I've been polite with you, as I just explained you my reasons. Was not my intention to offend anyone here, even if sometimes I add some pepper to my text.

I obviously have also appreciated your open mind approach, and the shown tolerance, for which I assumed like you suggested me to move to Technical Support instead than submit my issues over the forum (as done by the rest of users, that you have not invited to contact the Technical Support too), but the rest is just hystory now, as per past message traffic.


I was prepared to close our "querelle" by my previous one message, but reading your latest line, I feel like you deserve some more care from me.

1) I would point out that I'm also a moderator (on another forum, obviously), and sincerely, you more appear to me like a firefighter attempting to estinguish a fire with a gasoline can;

2) As a moderator, you should know very well that you cannot discriminate me, either, telling "to me only" to refer to Technical Support (as you didn't told this to the other users sharing my same issue), as also measuring the lenght of my messages, instead to understand their contents (as explained, I'm not english mothertongue, so it may be possible I'm less effective than you, or when I'm in a doubt to be misunderstood, I prefer to explain thngs more in detail);

3) I was checking the entire thread, and it looks to me that others long messages are present, but you didn't tell to such users they write a lot: do it wil be another discrimination (present message should not kept into account as addressed to you only, with same reasons to be here, as per your latest one);

4) I do not have noted any of your active contribution (lately at least, with the exception of a pair of your earlier messages, suggesting to "pull out the left arm if it will cause you any pain"), about the matter being discussed, in any case, I never required you to read or to reply to my onerous messages;

5) I believe like I've provided interesting information and reports (my eight off as XP SP3 PC should represent a reasonably large sample basis), never highlighted first over this entire thread, as probably, I also believe to have presented some evidences that may represent a good starting point to try to fix such issue, but it looks like instead to read, you just measured the message lenght;

6) as several McAfee licenze owner, I believe to have full rights to stay here and discuss with the rest of community about a commont trouble: if this will not fit to you, please let me know as I will try to get in touch with any commercial figure or responsible at McAfee, as we will check together where will be indeed the borderline;      


In any case, I would be indeed pleased to stop here, as this will not help the progress (if any) of such issue, as also I neither have required your personal advice, as also I've not required you to read me.

If you wish instead to proceed further, please PM to me and I will provide you my direct personal e-mail address for your complete satisfaction.

Please simply ignore me as fortunately someone else appears to have understood what I meant by my previous attempts about the low level instruction performed by mcshield.exe.

I wish to remind that I've 8 out of service PC thanking such issue and this put in serious suffering our work and this, understandably, is starting to cause us economical loss and delay: so if you are here to help, I thank you so much, otherwise, please simply ignore me and please try to cover your "many other duties" at your best, as I never required you or any other volunteer "to spend all day here".


Try to instead consider me as a  strange form of additional volunteer too, attempting to contribute to such issue, even if by a not ortodoss method .

I hope this will help to understand.


Sincere greetings to you Ex_Brit, and all the best from Italy
Steve

exbrit
MVP
MVP
Message 87 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

I don't think you offended anyone.  I trust I didn't say that?   All I meant was that it's far better to enlist the help of the people that are there specifically for that job as each case is different, although it may seem the same.

dougr_t3_suppor
Former Member
Message 88 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Hello McAfee Community,

I just wanted to provide an update on this issue.

The Support Engineering Operations team has filed a bug with our Engineering team (#955464). Engineering has opened a bug with a different team (#955477)

Root cause has been identified in the code and a fix is scheduled to be released in our next cycle (June).

We have created a Knowledgebase article. TS102038, http://service.mcafee.com/faqdocument.aspx?id=TS102038&lang=en_US

There are 3 advanced solutions you can try at your own risk. Each has different pros and cons.

- (KB Solution) Disable the floppy in device manager, requires knowledge of device manager, can be changed at will without rebooting

- Disable in CMOS, requires knowledge of BIOS setup access and application, user must reboot to make changes

- Insert a scratch disk in in the floppy drive, the drive will still be accessed by VirusScan, repeated drive access might damage disk  (don't use a disk with critical data),

If you disable the floppy you could use a USB(Thumb) drive.

Note: We have had some reports of users with media card readers with the same issue. The above solution should work for these users

I will keep the thread posted as I learn more.

Regards,

stonehenge
Former Member
Message 89 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

I've been following this thread since my original post around March 14 where I suggested the work-around of simply inserting a floppy into the chattering drive.  Since then, I have disabled the floppy in Device Manager as suggested by others here who are more sophisticated users than I am.  This works just as well and doesn't require floppy removal when rebooting.

My first reason for writing this is to let everyone know that my XP Pro SP 3 machine is a 2004 Dell XPS with a Pentium IV processor, pretty much state-of-the-art when new, now with memory upgraded to 3GB and harddrive to 1TB.  Last summer when I upgraded to the 1 TB HDD after the failure of the old one, I ran for a while using the free AVG protection and when I later re-installed McAfee AntiVirus Plus I noticed a small but perceptible slowdown in performance speed.  This was not a big deal and simply indicated to me that McAfee does consume resources.

Second, in my case the only symptom was the noise of the floppy drive - I had no related performance issues - even without disabling the floppy drive by using either of the methods noted above.  So my problem is not as severe as some of those "victims" here who have my sincere sympathies.

Finally, given that Microsoft is no longer supporting XP and that my present machine is now 10 years old, I have decided to treat myself by ordering a new Dell with a 4th gen Core i7 processor, lots of memory and HDD space at half the price of my 2004 unit!  The only downside is that I'll have to put up with Windows 8.1.  I guess one could say that this is the ultimate in an expensive work-around to the McAfee issue but that was not part of my decision.

Good luck to all who are staying with XP and I fully support your position that McAfee should fix this issue and soon.  Unfortunately, the Heartbleed/SSL problem could well focus their resources to that problem and away from XP.

Regards,

stonehenge

jk7868
Former Member
Message 90 of 152

Re: Latest update causing excessive CPU and Floppy Drive activity

Dougr_t3_support;

Let me preface this by saying that I greatly appreciate your efforts and the information that

you have provided on when a fix is targeted to show up. I know that sometimes being the

messenger is difficult and I sincerely appreciate your effort.

That being said, given McAfee’s response (or should I say lackadaisical response) provided

on the XP Floppy chattering and system performance issues, I for one will no longer spend

any money for any McAfee products from this point on, period.  I also will no longer be providing

any referrals for McAfee products…I have for years, touted how great the SW was.

Many moons ago when I started my small business, I bought a competitive product from

N_____.  After installing it and trying to use it, I had nothing but problems for the next 6

months…to the point that I got so disgusted that I backed up all my data and had to re-format

the drive to get all of the N_____ products off of it. I went out and bought my first McAfee

product and installed it.  It was a pleasure to use, friendly, easy and actually found problems

over the years that competitive products did not.  WithMcAfee, I was able to focus on my

core business and not on virus software/IT type problems.   Since, I have had minor distraction

issues with McAfee, but overall was happy.

Now, big brother Microsoft decided to stop support of XP.   I’m not sure if it’s the Intel influence

or why McAfee decided, but it is clearly apparent that McAfee no longer cares about it’s‘old’

XP based customers.  To provide a software release that can potentially damage your PC

hardware (without disabling your floppy in some manner) and in this same release to cause

significant performance degradation (as reported by others) is very disturbing.  But now

more disturbing, is the fact that a fix for these problems, introduced in early March, is targeted

to be released in June.  That clearly tells me that McAfee does not care about my business!!!

Could it be McAfee doesn’t care because only @20% of the computers out there are still running

XP?  Or, of that 20%, maybe half are running McAfee?  And of that, some percentage is

affected by this broken McAfee release?  I don’t know what the reason is, but when a software

release causes a loss (potential hardware, computer performance and human resource

productivity) and clearly displays a lackadaisical attitude towards a fix (in 3 months),

it’s time to go elsewhere for a solution.

Some feel that you should not be running XP anymore and if not upgrading to say W7,

then go buy a new computer with W8.  Let me say this, as a small business owner in this

economy, we cannot afford to go out and buy all new computers because big brother says

so.  And it’s not just the price of new computers that is the cost.  It’s all the new upgraded

software (OS, McAfee, Accounting, Office, Adobe, Programming, Special toolkits, etc…),

hardware peripherals( printers, faxes, USB HW tools, etc…), the installation/setup and

learning curves that add to the overall costs.  If it’s not broke, why fix it??  Oh wait a

minute, McAfee broke it, so I should go fix it, right? 


I know…another long email.  Ok, sorry, I’m off mysoap-box.  Enough said, enough productivity

lost because of this McAfee issue. 

Dougr_t3_support: Again, thank you for the information, sincerely appreciate it.

I am done with McAfee.  Over and out

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