Virus Scanner Irritations

So, I haven't been blogging much about my HTPC for the past year because it has been working very well and I haven't wanted to fiddle with it during the television season. However, I did run into a few issues during the year. The most annoying one was that I would have 30 seconds or so just disappear out of the program that I was watching. I was blaming the cable in my house when I realized that it happened at exactly the same time in two programs that were being recorded simultaneously. It could still be the cable, but it occurred to me that it could also be the McAfee virus scanner. The 2010 version of McAfee is much better than the 2009 version, but the 2009 version had a nasty habit of locking up the machine up for a significant period of time while it decompressed the download and installed it. I guess it was freezing any viruses on the machine and keeping them from corrupting the download, but it could also be preventing SageTV from reading the video capture card.

Fortunately, there was an easy answer: I configured McAfee to download the daily updates, but not install them without my permission. After I did that, the mysterious gaps in the programs all put stopped. There were still some times when there were gaps in the program, but I'm thinking that they were a corrupted signal. In the gaps with the virus scan, the SageTV progress bar showed a large red area at the point where the gap occurred. However the remaining gaps, there was not a red area. The viewer would just jump from one time in the program to the next. If I paused the program and repositioned it into the gap, I can still hear the program, although it is usually garbled, and the picture is frozen for a few seconds and then jumps to another frozen image. I do not know what causes this, but it could just be an issue at the cable company, or the qualify of the cable within my house. However, I digress, back to virus scanner.

One of the annoying things about the virus scanner is that it insists on running a full system scan while I'm watching a program. It's not that this impacts performance, but it seems to me that the machine should run them in the middle of the night. Sadly, while you can set up McAfee to run the scan during the middle of the night, it will only do it if the machine is actually powered on. McAfee won't do what SageTV does and turn the machine on to run the scan. I posted this to the McAfee customer forum and got the suggestion to set up a scheduled task to turn the machine on. So, I tried this and while it worked wonderfully to turn the machine on, McAfee still didn't run the scan. Looking at the Vista system log, it looked like the machine turned on at the right time and then, 5 minutes later, it turned itself off, before McAfee decided that it was OK to begin the scan. I don't know why the machine was turned off, because the power configuration was that the machine needed to be idle for 2 hours before it would power down. My guess is that SageTV was shutting it down, although I have no proof that. I know that SageTV will power on the machine in the middle of the night to download the latest schedule. Perhaps it takes the opportunity of my scheduled task to perform its downloads, waits 5 minutes to see if something interesting is going to happen, and then decides to shutdown the machine when it appears to be idle. Sigh.

So, I kludged it. I just scheduled SageTV to record for 2 hours at the same time as the virus scan. When I do that, 3 minutes into the program, the virus scan starts, and an hour and a half later, it completes. When I get a chance, I just discard the 2 hours of infomercials, a satisfying side benefit.

What I really want however, is to be able to schedule the update downloads in the middle of the night too. I can create a scheduled task to wake the machine and actually start McAfee's GUI. When I do this through Windows, the mcagent.exe program has an argument /desktopicon. I'm not sure where why Windows decided to apply this argument, but if mcagent also had an /update and /scan options that would force an update and a scan, then I could set up scheduled tasks to force it to do my bidding. I'll continue to investigate this possibility, but for now, I'll live with deleting infomercials.