Stealing My Cycles

I've got this recently-was-hot 2.8GHz Pentium 4 hyperthreading processor in my Windows box. There was a time when that much processing power was too bad to be had. But it's slow now. I thought maybe I was just getting used to the performance, and that the 2-year speed-freak fix time was coming up. But now I'm not so sure.

I wonder what the efficiency level of a patched, firewalled, and virus-protected Windows box is. I mean, every byte you read off the disk has to be read at least once by the virus scanner. Every accessed byte of memory has to be scanned; every email you send goes through the virus scanner, the firewall software, and then gets scanned by every single mail server along the way, just to make sure. And that's in addition to the normal operations that have to be performed on a message, like typing it, spellchecking it, and looking up all the nifties that it takes to route an SMTP message from here to yon.

It's not just for email, either. Every web page you load gets scanned. Every document you open, every jpeg you view, and every movie file you watch has to be scanned and monitored before you ever see it. Every byte that gets read from your hard drive or from the network has to be compared to a table of hundreds of thousands of Windows-based viruses for similarities; and, if you've set your virus software up that way, heuristically analyzed against a second table of virus patterns. Your firewall does it, too. Every connection you try to open gets put through a series of tests to make sure that the program opening the connection is authorized to connect to that address, at this particular time, and for how long. I'm sure these programs are well-written, and as efficient as they can possibly be under the circumstances, but still, it's a huge amount of overhead.

Basically, I'm wondering just what percentage of the world's CPU cycles are actually spent wiping Bill Gates' ass for him.