Senior said:
I don't disable e-mail scanning.
My antivirus is Norton CE 10.0 and there isn't a problem on the other PC
in
my organization.
The other PC (used for comparison) is not the one with which you are having
a problem. Because of different hardware and software setup, two hosts may
look the same but are not the same so one works and the other does not. It
it likely that the hardware and software fingerprints of the two hosts are
not identical. I have also many times seen where a setup was working for a
long time and then stop working, often because of updates to the OS or
applications.
Scanning of e-mail by anti-virus software is duplication and unnecessary
protection. You lose no coverage by disabling e-mail scanning. Also, you
can simply disable e-mail scanning *temporarily* to see if the high CPU
usage goes away. Because the AV program interrogates the data stream,
incoming and outbound mails are delayed which can cause timeouts in the
e-mail client. Also, all this scanning of the data traffic requires CPU
cycles and that may be why the CPU usage goes up. Anything else you have
inline with the mail traffic will also expend CPU cycles to interrogate that
traffic, like anti-spam products. Even the firewall will slow network
traffic although hopefully not by much. If you want to find out why CPU
usage goes high during e-mail processing then you have to minimalize how
much software is doing that e-mail processing.
I verify the PC with ad-aware, Spy Boots & Destroy and MS Spyware but
there
is any problem.
It doesn't have to be malware that is causing high CPU usage. Using e-mail
scanning in an anti-virus product will consume CPU cycles to interrogate the
mail traffic. Using anti-spam software to interrogate the mail traffic will
consume CPU cycles. Using a firewall will consume CPU cycles. The more you
add to interrogate the traffic, the more it gets slowed and the more CPU
cycles are consumed (and the more memory you consume with those extra
processes which could lead to using the pagefile which is the slow hard
drive if you don't have enough real memory).
