Today, my machine seemed slow. Not the normal slow, but excessively slow. Our IT department does a good job at what they do, however, I think there's a lot of overhead in some of the applications they've chosen to make their lives easier. I understand, it's a tradeoff between keeping our systems functioning, and them having time to deal with more critical business issues.

It just seems ridiculous that opening IE takes so long, or typing in Visual studio has laggy moments. I opened up my Task Manager, and went right to the Processes tab. "AeXRSAgt.exe" sucking up 168MB of precious RAM. What the hell is that? For a moment, I'm worried. Did I get some spy-ware on here somehow? Do I have a virus.... hmm.

A quick trip to http://www.processlibrary.com/ and type the process name into their search. It tells me they have not reviewed the security implications of this process, however, it's author is Altiris, Inc. That's our backup software. It runs all the time continually backing up my  laptop. It has saved me once or twice, but I start to ask the question, "Is the data loss I could experience worth taking the risk of not having this software?" My source code is all backed up in Subversion, so what am I really protecting?

The really important stuff in My Documents is project documentation, and once it's been client approved, it's stored on an extranet.

I understand why they want to have this software, I just wish I could work without it sucking up all my resources. I just looked again, and it's calmed down, but between that, virus, and other IT mandated software, I'm guessing I give up at least a quarter of my available RAM at any given time.

Sigh.