My antivirus program decides that I’m like an idiot and insists on running on a Friday afternoon during weekdays. Policies or not, it’s NOT fun when you’re in the midst of coding and everything comes to a screeching halt because an AV scan is running. The particular one I’m talking about is Symantec Antivirus v10, which can use up to 50% or more and suck up hundreds of megabytes of RAM when it’s running. It’s fair enough that I run the AV auto-protect all the time but why force a full system scan down my throat? I KNOW how to take care of my computer and I’m observant enough to notice any unknown services running in the background. So why?

Anyway, here’s a sweet way to kill off the stupid service - go to your Services and stop it. Then restart it so you get auto-protect back up. The full scan won’t run again. Killing it via task manager or the excellent ProcessExplorer didn’t work, even after granting full access to the process and escalating myself to Administrator. Dang.

Got pissed off earlier because the IT department started to force a 10 minute screen saver with password lock on all company laptops. Luckily, editing the registry quickly allowed me to disable the screen saver.

Really, what’s with these noobs trying all this nonsense? Maybe it’s because of the virus that infected the whole network and brought it down for 3 days a few weeks back? Which I might add was probably caused by sloppy checking by the IT department people themselves when issuing old laptops which was running ancient AV software. Probably even had expired licenses hence no live update available. Masking their mistake with a blanket-wide drastic measures - typical.

But not really effective.

Edit: Oops, looks like I didn’t mention the service - it’s rtvscan. To kill it, stop Symantec Antivirus service. Don’t forget to restart it less you wanna run Windows without an Antivirus program. Not smart. Unless of course, you use Linux for real work and Windows is just for your games