Kaspersky - is it the worst security suite?

I recently upgraded to windows 8 after a series of problems I had with windows 7, which started when I uninstalled Kaspersky Internet Secuirty 2012 to upgrade to KIS 2014.

After the upgrade, most of the USB devices I connected were not recognized (luckily the wired mouse and keyboard did keep working). Quite a few people experienced this and there's some registry voodoo to fix this. Unfortunately the fix didn't work, and since I had to reinstall windows to fix this, I decided to upgrade to win 8.1.

After I installed Win8 I had yet another 2 issues. The first one with VMWare Workstation. For some reason, VMWS wasn't able to create a bridged connection (most of my VMs use this rather than NAT)... going through the Kaspersky Forums, a few people recommended in this case to uninstall KIS, create the network bridge, reinstall KIS. What a PITA, but it did work.

So now I have everything ready to start coding? Not really. Some encrypted connections kept dying on me (something as simple as a git pull from a tiny github repo would take 10 minutes and end up in a connection failure). Pausing the protection didn't help, so I went through the pain of uninstalling KIS, trying, reinstalling KIS just to prove that the problem was KIS (rather than a dodgy router). Finally I found that KIS 2015 has a feature to snoop on all encrypted connections and that was affecting the connection. So I had to go to settings -> additional -> Network -> uncheck Scan encrypted connections.

I'm quite sure that companies providing security suites are having more and more trouble to provide working, compatible software, as malware becomes more advanced, the number of consumer applications multiply, and the incompatibility matrix becomes a 1000000000x1000000000 minesweeper game with half of the cells with bombs which move around.

I think at some point I'm going to install Sophos UTM and see how that goes...

Enable core parking to safe precious battery life

This will allow windows to park cores dynamically, which (hopefully) translates into precious mWh saved.

• Open regedit
• Search for the data 'unparked cores' (or just find the key below)
• Keep searching until you get to the following key (in CurrentControlSet).
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583
• Find the value "Attributes" and rename it to "Attributes.off" (this doesn't actually do anything apart from preventing windows from finding the real key... and it gives you a rollback path).
• Now search for the term 'unparked cores' and you should end up on the following key
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\ea062031-0e34-4ff1-9b6d-eb1059334028
• Again, find the value "Attributes" and rename it to "Attributes.off"
• Reboot

The key allows to change the minimum number of parked cores, while the second one allows to set the maximum number of parked cores.
Now you can go to Control Panel -> Power Options and edit the power profile. You'll find two new entries under Processor power management.

Windows 7 internal shutdown command

It looks like Windows 7 now has its own shutdown command. If you want to shutdown your computer with a timer, you can run:

shutdown.exe /s /t 3600

/s tells the command to do a shutdown (no reboot) and /t is to add a time out. So the command above is equivalent to the linux command

shutdown -h 3600

If you suddenly don't want to shutdown (or reboot) your computer, you can abort the command with

shutdown.exe /a