I can bring any system to its knees

Earlier this year I bought a new computer. And now I seem to have broken it. I appear to have a rare talent, I can over time reduce any computer to abject uselessness. I have behind me a trail of Dell, Novatech and even Apple machines which have slowed down to a snails pace and become much harder to use. Just because I’ve been using them for a while.

My lovely Sony Ultrabook is still mostly lovely, but the touch screen driver has acquired an irritating habit of suddenly tapping the touch screen rapidly and making the mouse unusable. I can get rid of that problem by using CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the lock screen but it is still irritating. I’m not sure if it is hardware or software to be honest, it seemed to start after I took the (apparently stupid) step of enabling the automatic download of updates and the machine turned itself on in my bag and tried to commit thermal suicide.

I can live with the occasional touch screen foibles though, what I’m finding much harder to deal with is the way that the “Anti Malware Service Executable” will suddenly and violently take my machine away from me by pushing the hard drive activity to 100%. This happens after a reboot and when I’m trying to get something done and is very annoying. The stupid process seems to have no way of working out that “Robert is actually using the machine now” and just wades in and breaks everything.

While it is amusingly ironic that a program designed to protect me against my machine becoming clogged and unusable is actually making my machine clogged and unusable, it is also darned annoying.

Verity Stob writes of cruft, which builds up and slows down a machine, and I’m probably suffering a bit from that. I think that when Windows 8.1 shows up I’ll do a complete re-install and see if that sorts things out.