Tech Forum

The Enterprise Symantec Antivirus client is much more friendly to the system and easier to work with than the Norton Antivirus (or Internet Security or Systemworks or etc..) product aimed at residential and small business users. I've often wished that Symantec would just produce some stripped down version of the enterprise client to replace Norton Antivirus with and toss their current Norton Antivirus to the curb.

enriquer wrote:Our stake has boycotted this upgrade.

Just keep in mind that Desktop 5.5 (or later) is a prerequisite for connecting the administrative machines to the Internet.

McAfee gets my vote, with ClamAV as a close second

Application startup is very slow with the new image. I have seen a few different instances of people double clicking on an application's icon, waiting for a while, giving up, double clicking it again, then eventually having to get rid of dialog boxes complaining that the application was already crawling, er running. I have seen this with MLS on the ward machine and IE in the FHC. It's much slower than the previous XP Home-based ward system.

Is additional RAM the recommended solution?

Are there other recommended solutions? Is there something the stake folks can do to tune the system?

Or, should users just expect to read a Psalm or two while waiting for each application to start?

rmrichesjr wrote:Application startup is very slow with the new image. I have seen a few different instances of people double clicking on an application's icon, waiting for a while, giving up, double clicking it again, then eventually having to get rid of dialog boxes complaining that the application was already crawling, er running. I have seen this with MLS on the ward machine and IE in the FHC. It's much slower than the previous XP Home-based ward system.

Is additional RAM the recommended solution?

Are there other recommended solutions? Is there something the stake folks can do to tune the system?

Or, should users just expect to read a Psalm or two while waiting for each application to start?

Well, to speed up the overall system, there are numerous
reports on other lists that upgrading to 512 Meg will speedup
the startup of the computer, printing, and a few other things.
Speeding up MLS, on the other hand is up to the developer's.

One completely unauthorized speedup for English speakers
is to remove all the other language files from MLSStrings.jar.
I won't go too much into this as it will cause your machine to
no longer be able to be "patched" from transmissions to/from
CHQ. This speed improvement was mainly only on the
Startup of MLS anyhow. About 10-20% faster.

Since MLS 2.3, I have submitted through the appropriate
channels a request that they split MLSStrings.jar into
multiple files, so only the language you are currently
using resides in valuable RAM memory but without
any replies, or public bugtracker; I have no idea if I
was ever heard.

If you do upgrade memory, though, one trick is to
take all the memory from one machine and put it
into another machine, and then get an upgrade kit
for the empty machine.

For example:
Each machine has two 128 Meg Chips out of a total of 4 slots.
So you move the memory from one machine so one is empty
and one has four 128 Meg chips or 512 Meg Ram total.
Then you buy a 512 Meg upgrade kit comprised of two 256 Meg chips.
Thus upgrading both machines for the price of one.

Also, a weekly defrag can help out with performance (a vert little)
in addition to any recovery if you ever lose files.
Even monthly doesn't hurt.

- Atticus

Thanks for the tips. It sounds like the most practical solution is to increase RAM to 512MB. I'll pass that along to our stake tech. specialist. I'll point him to this forum, and maybe he'll register.

As mentioned, more memory will help startup, but only startup. Personally I'd have difficulty justifying the cost of added memory just to speed the bootup for the limited number of people to who use the computer unless you have "extra" money.

rmrichesjr wrote:Or, should users just expect to read a Psalm or two while waiting for each application to start?

That actually works quite well. Plan on doing something else while the computer is starting and it ceases to be a real problem.

You can help start up significantly if you scrap the OpenOffice loader. It doesn't prevent OpenOffice from running. And frankly I don't know as it speeds up OO that much. I might feel different if OO was the primary app, but in most wards, it isn't.

RussellHltn wrote:Just keep in mind that Desktop 5.5 (or later) is a prerequisite for connecting the administrative machines to the Internet.

Good thing we don't have any internet access then.

It is definitely not a technology requirement so I am guessing this is some procedure you have learned about. Do tell what you know?;)

Although, in the interest of security I wouldn't put any XP computers on the internet without a bullet proof hardware firewall.

enriquer wrote:It is definitely not a technology requirement so I am guessing this is some procedure you have learned about. Do tell what you know?;)

I just read the instructions that come in the package. It says that Desktop 5.5 is a (policy) requirement before you are allowed to connect an administrative computer to the Internet.

I'm sure a lot of user would like to see that happen.

I'm not sure what all is contained in Desktop 5.5 other then standardization. It does contain a backup, so it's possible to "restore" the computer if it becomes corrupted. Although exactly what gets restored, I have no idea. The documentation doesn't go into that detail.

I moved the unrelated discussion about antivirus solutions to a [thread=501]new thread[/thread].