Tech McAfee causing hardware driver issues? Other problems?

[Ethics]

Yes, yes, I shouldn't use McAfee. I usually don't, but in this case it was easiest to have it on my current system. It has also since been replaced. MOVING ON.

Has anyone heard of McAfee, or any other antivirus causing global lag spikes? I upgraded a laptop recently and ran into this issue, at first I only got a single spike once a day but about a week later it was at least once every minute. To clarify on "spikes" I mean that my CPU usage would jump from 2% or 4% to about 80-some-odd-percent. The mouse would lock in place, the audio would sound like it was gargled by a wood chipper. This would generally last for 2-3 seconds before clearing, and the PC would resume normal operation.

After doing some Google searching of my own, I found it was actually a common issue for ASUS G75 laptops that came prepackaged with McAfee. I read through the threads and found that the problem utterly vanished after uninstalling and rebooting. Lo-and-behold, it up and vanished.

My drivers are fine, and is not an issue with an outdated or newly downloaded driver. (I'm not saying the issue isn't driver related, I'm saying McAffee is the ONLY thing having the issue)

What, exactly, would McAfee be doing that would such terrible spikes?


A relevant video from the forum I mentioned earlier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZdmM1qjLxk

 

[dra600n]

McAfee is constantly monitoring any files on your computer that get modified or opened, as do all virus scanners, but McAfee also hooks into windows API's and ensures that everything is as it should be. I don't use McAfee on my home PC (I use AVG Free), but at work we use it and we've had to configure the hell out of it to make sure things like you've described went away. Like Norton, McAfee is a resource hog. If I tries to access a locked file, it'll retry it X more times, usually causing a CPU spike (think of an endless loop) until it reaches it's maximum attempts (usually systems files or critical files already in use).

Or, in other words, it's just an issue in McAfee that they refuse to acknowledge

 

[AuronX]

McAfee definitely causes problems. I've actually serviced people's computers when they thought it had a virus, and the real problem was that it had McAfee...the problems it caused were that bad.

I'd uninstall McAfee with CCleaner and then run the normal cleaning functions of the same program to try and clean up temporary files and registry entries that McAfee may have left behind. Try Malwarebytes or Panda Cloud Antivirus instead (Malwarebytes is highly recommended though). Both are lightweight but get the job done very well. If you don't want to spend money, I'd even suggest trying having both programs' free versions on your PC at the same time. They shouldn't interfere with each other and thereby cause slowdowns, but you'll have to keep your eye on it. Still, they'll keep you covered without being obnoxious like McAfee.

 

[dra600n]

See, I highly advise against CCleaner, unless you know exactly what you're doing. I've had a computer tech in my department royally fuck up several machines by using it to the point where we've banned that software from being on our network. Malwarebytes is awesome, so I'm with you there. I've never used Panda Cloud AV, so I don't have anything to say on that one.

I used to use Free-AV, but it let through a common virus once, after 6 years of using it, and I switched to AVG Free for the last 2 years, and haven't had any issues since (then again, I do most of my "dirty" browsing on a Virtual Machine).

 

[Ethics]

Yes, I know that McAfee has many issues, and as I said it has since been replaced. I usually avoid McAfee, but the situation lent itself well to remain with McAfee for the time remaining. (Points for Malwarebytes, though, love it)

The issue, however, is that the spikes occurred no matter what I was doing or how long I had been doing that task (if any). I could idle my PC, bar perhaps some kind of music player and it would still spike every minute or so. There should be no new massive requests or scans from McAfee. The question I proposed is, what exactly is McAfee doing that would require such large spikes regardless of tasks, activity? My system should not buckle even with relatively large tasks. Spiking 80% of an Intel i7-3610QM so frequently (at least every minute) just for checking files is absolutely insane.

The question I'm proposing, however, is what could McAfee be doing that causes such large spikes? At this point, I'm more or less resigned to "McAfee is just shit," but I am curious as to what processes it could have been attempting. Surely they didn't just try a constant loop?