Why Isn't The Computer Doing The Heavy Lifting?

I'm in a mood to rant. In a small company sits a PC that is in constant use throughout the day. This PC is about a year old, has 1GB of RAM and is on a small network. Installed on it is a well-known antivirus product that is always up to date. Also on this system are three different anti-spyware products. They each run a scan every day. The hard drive is defragmented twice a week. The hosts file has not been hijacked. No third-party toolbars are installed in the browser. All Windows and IE patches are applied. There's no desktop search application (anymore) that's constantly indexing system content and creating an index file many gigabytes in size.

So why is this system running slower than cold molasses?

The PC is mine. No one else uses this system. At the moment, it's running in Safe Mode and doing just fine. But boot it up normally and you can go out for lunch and a walk in the park as it processes a single mouse click or a character typed on the keyboard. Simply booting up takes nearly 15 minutes. And shutting down? Well, it won't.

Now sure, you could say this is my fault, because I'm constantly installing, uninstalling, and re-installing products that various vendors send me for evaluation purposes, hoping I'll write nice things. The problem with that, of course, is that no company wants its product uninstalled. So they never write an uninstall routine that truly removes everything.

Installed and running are what seems like a zillion tiny agents. They load when the PC starts. One checks the ink level in a locally attached inkjet printer. Another syncs my PDA. Another tells me the weather (can't I just look out the window?). Another wakes up when I plug my digital camera into a USB port. There's one that starts the file-backup process at 3:00 a.m. Another defrags the drive. Another updates virus definitions. You get the picture.

The Add/Remove Programs dialog lists software I've never heard of. Often, these are utilities that come with a product I had an interest in. Sometimes they're not. Some won't uninstall even when invoking that very process.

The Processes tab on the Windows Task Manager still lists items from products uninstalled long ago (that is, after you take the time to hunt down and identify them with no help from Windows). And the registry --- well, let's just say there are many, many entries that belong to nothing that's currently on the PC.

It's a mess. There ought to be a law.

In the old days, we'd simply reformat the hard drive, re-install Windows and go from there. But in this age of installation keys and product activations, it's not that simple.

There's plenty of blame to go around. Ok, start with me. But I've been vigilant about housekeeping. Blame the hardware and software makers whose drivers, utilities, applications, and bundled add-ons leave remnants scattered throughout the drive. Blame Microsoft; the operating system really has no idea what's installed on the computer, what belongs there, what doesn't, and what has been orphaned and never will be used. Blame the software vendors that claim their utilities will restore system health. That's more wishful thinking than fact.

What's scary is that I have a somewhat reasonable idea of maintaining my system. But that's not true for most companies or for home-office users or consumers. Can you imagine all the adware, malware, spyware, and other garbage-ware that's drowning these systems? Not everyone has perimeter security; for many, the built-in Windows firewall on each PC is it.

A recent study conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance and America Online reported that approximately 80 percent of all users had some form of spyware or adware on their systems. The average computer contained 93 spyware or adware components. Even more troubling is that 88 percent of respondents whose computers tested positive had no idea that their systems were infected.

We've all got work to do.