Recently one of my PC's have been acting like a two year old toddler.

Why?

Because I upgraded to the latest version of one the best known PC security products.

After upgrading my PC I was instantly bombarded with a number of animated icons telling me that my PC was being protected, my files were being scanned and my spam was being tinned. As I sat and watched this firework display of animated icons and listened to my hard disk working harder than it has done for months it occurred to me that all this was fine, but it was effectively stopping me doing my job.

Software that was supposed to protect me was undertaking an irritating denial of service attack of its own making. Irritating as it was shouting and screaming like a naughty two year old trying to get my attention and prove it was trying to do something useful.

It's not as if my PC was previously unprotected and I was installing this software for the first time—it was an upgrade for heaven's sake!

To me it appeared that the vendor wanted to prove that it was doing the business and to that end had employed a team of designers to come up with the most annoying way to animate a square centimetre of my PC screen real estate. Quite frankly I don't, and shouldn't, care about such trivia. This stuff should just sit there in the background and do its work.

Of course there are a number of buried options you can track down to switch off this annoying reporting—mostly—but not everyone has the time or ability to track these down. By default you get the screaming two year old.

How many other users are sitting at their PCs right now and getting just as irritated as me? Or maybe I need another holiday…