Since upgrading to Tiger, my 12" 1GHz PowerBook has been running exceedingly hot, with the fans going flat out all the time. Foolishly, I assumed this to be a bug in Tiger that would be fixed in a later release; one exhausted battery and a number of updates later, there was no change and I decided I better investigate the problem…

Five minutes with top -o cpu revealed that a process by the name of ‘VShieldCheck’ was permanently using at least 70% of the processor. Now, I’ve always been fairly skeptical of anti-virus software but, I thought on the Mac things might be different. Alas, it appears that the OS X offerings are as mediocre as those for Windows—purging my system of Virex has returned it to it’s normal pre-Tiger performance!

It would be refreshing to see anti-virus companies spend more effort on writing a decent product and less on convincing the customer that they are at risk. Currently they seem to be focusing much more on the mobile market—another area in which they seem to be determined to talk-up risks, persuading users to buy software which adversely affects their experience.