I recently built a monster of a computer and was extremely delighted to chop through tasks like Chinese cleaver through chicken wing.

But, my whole world came crashing down when loading a single extension onto Chrome would take almost 30 seconds; a quick search in the start menu search bar would take 5 seconds to pop up; when loading windows would take twice as long. I was utterly floored.

At first I thought the small size 400MB pagefile.sys was giving me problems. I increased it to 9GB. Nada. Since my pagefile.sys was on my RAID, I thought my onboard raid controller/RAID was crapping out. I switched my whole pagefile.sys to my SSD. Still no cigar.

Finally, I uninstalled McAfee security center and my speed went KABOOM! Don’t get me wrong, I’m ain’t riding McAfee’s sack; I’m not even sure it was McAfee! I also had Panda Cloud Virus scanner installed so it could just be a conflict between the two virus scanners.

The moral of this story is this:

  1. You should NEVER install more than one virus software on your computer, because it may slow your system down to a CRAWL.
  2. Choose a lightweight virus software like Panda Cloud (It’s FREE!)
  3. Backup on-site, Backup off-site, Backup often–nothing will beat this, not even a virus.

Soon I’ll write an article about how I back up my system and what redundancy is best for the photography/video editing line of work. Check back soon!