I bought a used laptop. It had Mint on it, but was tied to a Windows 8 license, so I restored it to Windows 8. The computer is no wimp (1st or 2nd gen i7, 8GB RAM, and so on).
It must be noted that the install took hours; much longer than it should. The UI was utterly unresponsive (e.g., 20 seconds between physical mouse click and it responding), it would read some from the disc, take 10+ minutes of thinking/doing nothing before reading more from disc, and so on. I was a bit worried about my purchase at this point, but after untold hours (I let it sit while I went to work), it finally completed and was pretty responsive thereafter. It should be noted, this was a clean install, everything was wiped including partitions, MBR (I assume Mint and Windows use different tables), everything. So, hopefully this eliminates chance of something surviving across installs.
One of the first things I do is install a firewall / AV on a fresh install. I had reasonable success with Comodo, so I gave it another shot. Install of CIS went fine using stock settings. So I started installing more stuff (Firefox, VLC, flash, OpenOffice, iTunes, etc).
Somewhere between OpenOffice and iTunes something goes fishy. Windows 8 tile world stops responding, specifically, “PC Settings” (never had a bluetooth enabled laptop before so I was tinkering with pairing it with my phone; side bar, it really does nothing useful). I tried plugging my phone in via USB so iTunes could recognize it, but nothing happens and Windows fails to recognize it. I try a System Restore which thankfully fixes the tile world responsiveness but iTunes fails to start after re-installation.
Also, somewhere along the line, Comodo notifies me there is a trojan in some user tmp dir. I find this strange since I am only downloading from known sources, but it seems everyone (Comodo included) likes to bundle paid junk with their app. It gives me some line about calling GeekBuddy or some such. When I click “let me handle it”, nothing happens. It shows nothing in quarantine nor any indication that it found something bad. At this point, I am suspecting foul play. I download avast! and let it run, but it finds nothing.
I am confused at this point, but I am not far into my installing so I let Windows “refresh” itself. During the re-install, it reboots unexpectedly due to a DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE BSOD. Still triaging that as it may explain why initial install took forever, but again everything worked in the end. So, I install Comodo again. One thing I notice this time is that when I drag and drop a folder for it to scan, the antivirus takes about 20 minutes to initialize. After that, it initializes quickly until the next reboot. On a separate Windows 7 laptop, it initializes in seconds the first time.
Assuming you have survived to the end of my story, do you have any ideas of how the pieces of this puzzle fit together? I am afraid with a 20 minute initialization, the antivirus may not be doing anything.