Given that Microsoft Security Essentials has copped a bit of a pasting in the press lately I thought I would review both the current offerings and my stance on antivirus products. Of course, free is a good price for many plus it is an easy way for antivirus vendors to upsell you to other bundled products. Sometimes this is good and sometimes this is bad but for my purposes I am just interested in an antivirus solution (I have no interest in spam, encryption or social media solutions).
So, after a quick bit of research I thought I would give Bitdefender a go and similar to Microsoft Security Essentials it just sits in the background doing its thing without bugging you all that often. However, I had a pretty serious issue after the initial installation and reboot whereby I lost all of my desktop icons and Start screen tiles upon logging in. On my desktop I had five icons and on my Start screen I had two tiles (one for desktop and and the other to get to the Windows Store).
For the average player this would have been a major freak out.
Mind you, this not only happened on my Panasonic AX2 ultrabook running Windows 8 Pro but also my desktop computer running the same OS. maybe that it was coincidental but I have to say the strike rate isn’t very good at all from my experience to date.
Anyway, the way I got everything back was to start up a couple of services that hadn’t kicked in (for whatever reason). You can do this as follows:
- Hit Window Key + D to get to the desktop from the Start screen.
- Hit Windows Key + R to get the run dialogue box,
- Type in services.msc and hit Enter,
- Scroll down until you find Windows Server Initalization Service and right click on it,
- Click on Start in the menu,
- Locate Windows Server LAN Configuration and right click on it,
- Click on Start in the menu,
- Log out of your account (or reboot your computer),
- Login again.
That got things going again for me and after a few seconds my Start screen repopulated its tiles and my desktop was back to normal.
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