Need Computer Help for Daughter at College

[hsmomx3]

Her computer randomly shut down and she cannot turn it back on. Her battery was running low and she started charging it and everything was plugged in. She tried turning it on several times and nothing. What could it be?

[Mountain Bike Vomit Carnage]

Unless your daughter is a whale, I promise that there is already a cohort of eligible men with exceptional computer skills solving this problem for her.

What an incredibly nasty thing to say about someone's daughter.

[1010RD]

Wait a minute. Why don’t you like Kaspersky? Please advise.

[PugetSoundSoldier]

Serious CPU hog - even worse than Norton, in my experience. I really, strongly recommend Microsoft’s own tool - Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s VERY light in CPU load, auto-updating, and free!

[1010RD]

I don’t have that problem, at least not on the four computers I am running Kaspersky on. During scans I’ll get a high end spike of 62% CPU usage, but it averages 35%.

My bigger concern is how MSE compares qualitatively. I like that Kaspersky updates hourly. Of course I like free, but Kaspersky costs me less than $4 a month divide by 4 (potentially 6) computers and I’m at a $1/month or less.

Cost isn’t as much a factor to me a reliability and protection. I’ve not been able to find any very good comparisons. They mostly seem like ads meant to look like neutral comparisons. What’s your experience with Kaspersky’s realtime protection?

[PugetSoundSoldier]

My experience with Kaspersky is that it is a CPU hog, and noticeably slows down the operation of the computer, as well as causes laptop fans to run continuously because of the CPU load.

Note, however, that I’ve never had a virus infection (been mailed plenty of trojans and malware, but then again I don’t just install files because John Doe e-mailed me a “resume”), so I’m not looking for something that will protect any possible infection attack. The user is the first line of defense, and if I’m not expecting an attachment/file from someone - even if it’s someone I know - I don’t open it. Period.

So, I’m not a fan of the “always live/always running” virus scanners because of the loading they put on the computer. And in some cases you can cause a laptop with a marginal thermal system to overheat - also not good!