Cav's Place

Since this second trial of Emsisoft Anti-Malware finished Tuesday night, I’m now on the second day of the third trial of Kaspersky Anti-Virus, and it may actually not be an abuse because the first was on the old computer and the second, while started when I reinstalled Windows on the new one, was still of the 2015 version, so I didn’t go above a reasonable expectation of one trial period per version per computer. Either way, so far it seems to be going all right and the obvious changes compared to the previous version are minimal, though at the moment I do notice some detail missing from reports. It does, however, have a more significant impact on performance, and in fact it may be the most significant impact I’ve experienced throughout this year of testing, so I’ll have to see what that’s about, because it probably remains the most realistic option when it comes to deciding what I’ll stick to next year.

Emsisoft remains the other option, but while it seems to do well in tests I keep having this feeling that it’s less thorough than it should be. The worse problem, however, is the fact that there’s no separation between definition updates and program updates, so having it update automatically, which is pretty much needed for definitions, also implies forced automatic program updates that even include version changes, as during this trial I caught the launch of version 11 and it simply updated to it on its own and asked for a reboot when I definitely don’t think that major version changes should be automatic. Granted, version 11 has a “delayed” setting for program updates, which should help with this if it works as it should.
Still, without program updates set to “delayed”, suddenly getting the first update of the version 11 branch was quite an issue, and such a faulty update should never be served without explicit warnings and user confirmation, regardless of settings. Now I seem to have gotten through it better than others, as in my case everything was still in place once the image returned and it only caused BOINC to malfunction, which was fixed by turning that off and then back on, but others had far more serious problems. The major issue seemed to be that it logged off other user accounts, or at least shut down programs running on other accounts, when it updated, which is obviously something that may never be done without explicit user consent, plus that it would appear that the original release had a bug that caused it to turn off explorer.exe on Windows 7 when it was turned off and it needed to turn itself off to update, so everybody suddenly had their screen go black and then things may have looked weird when the image returned.
I do rather like Emsisoft in a number of ways, including the fact that support is received quickly on the forums, that it uses definitions from BitDefender, the news and alerts offered and the way in which it offers them, the fact that they seem to take privacy seriously, and even that it’s still a relatively small player on this market. For these reasons, I would be inclined to purchase it instead of Kaspersky, which also has the huge disadvantage, in my view, of being a Russian product, and even more so instead of ESET NOD32, which would be the third choice because I definitely liked the options offered and didn’t otherwise have problems with it but it always seems to be lagging in tests and that’s a serious problem. Still, I want some assurances about the updates, because I absolutely won’t have something like that happen again, plus that it can’t be purchased directly from here and I have no card, so I’ll have to look into the wire transfer option, though it’s a good thing that at least that’s also offered.

Otherwise, for some time I’ve been having issues with the blog, in the form of it consistently requiring just over 24 seconds to load the first time after I open the browser, so if anyone reading this experiences something similar, let me know. If I turn WP-SpamShield off, this doesn’t seem to happen anymore, but I’ve had a similar issue with some other part of the site and that can’t be caused by this. However, I checked with my host and they said they were unable to replicate the problem, also asked a friend and she said she doesn’t experience anything of the sort, and a long and thorough discussion with the author of WP-SpamShield would indicate that it’s nothing actually caused by that either. At the same time, the issue does appear on dad’s computer as well, and it is possible that it actually started when the network I’m in was taken over, or, as they put it, “entered a partnership” with another, so I wonder if it’s not something somehow caused by them. But why and how, I have no idea, the only thing I could figure out being that, for the blog, the problem appears when that plugin is active and the PHP session cookie is not set. Once it’s set, it works normally.

But I guess I’ll see what that’s all about, and if it actually doesn’t affect others as well it’s not necessarily that much of a problem, so let me finish this by saying that this week’s run was Monday and I truly pushed as hard as I possibly could. The result was records at every single point, so managing not only a total time of 20:21, beating the previous record by nine seconds, but also intermediate times of 4:18, 9:51 and 15:49, respectively, so beating the previous records at those points by 12, three and ten seconds, respectively.
That was the 35th proper run this year and it may well be the last, as temperatures are finally getting somewhat lower now and it’s raining a lot. In addition, the insole of one of my running shoes has been moving around as of a few weeks ago, and while fixing it with some glue would be very easy I’m thinking of taking them back to the shop I bought them from back in February in order to have them do it, since they were supposed to have a two-year warranty and this issue appeared after less than one year. I’m actually rather angry about it, though in a disappointed sort of way…