Nero Scout

[-pops-]

For the past few weeks I have been having some speed (lack of) problems on one of my machines.

It was pretty much free of crud and rubbish, AVG gave it the all clear as did all the other anti-malware programs (except for a few tracking cookies which were quickly dealt with) but still the machine was slow and unresponsive. There was no undue CPU activity but there was an uncharacteristic, almost constant, rumbling of one of the hard drives. The slowness was shown by the AVG scan which normally took 45 minutes began to take over two hours to complete.

I posted a HJT scan which nel gave the thumbs up to (apart from one very minor thing) so I was left more or less stuck.

The odd thing was that after a certain time, which varied considerably day to day, the machine would suddenly start behaving properly. This suggested that something hidden was using the machine's resources but I couldn't think what it could be - the only change to the machine in the last few weeks was my update of Nero to version 7.

Therein lies the answer. There is a nasty and pointless addition to the Nero 7 suite which, if you have more than a few files, will tie up your computer for an inordinate amount of time:

Nero Scout – Database Technology

Nero Scout is a new, unique media database that provides instant access to the user’s media files from any Nero application, Windows Explorer and many standard Windows applications.

Highlights at a glance:

* Optimized to provide access to media files from all Nero applications

* Browse media files from Windows Explorer

Now, this may be a useful bit of software if you only have a few files to be "optimized" but this machine has many GBs of photographs, videos, PDF and TIFF data files stored on it. The daftest thing about this Nero Scout abomination is that it forgets everything if you shut down and it goes through the same file rebuilding procedure at every re-boot. This re-building can take hours if there are a lot of files and it slows your computer to a snail's pace.

So, folks, if you have a lot on your machine and you have Nero 7, shut down/disable the Nero Scout for a "happier computing experience."

[dadyassa]

Thanks for the heads up pops, I think I will stick with 6 though.

Perhaps Nero need to learn a bit from Google`s Picasa ;)