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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.


12:22pm on Wednesday, 12th January, 2005:

Broadband Woes

Outburst

Broadband finally made it to my house on 23rd December, 2004. I should be happy, right?

Well I am happy with broadband itself. What I'm not happy with is Norton Utilities' gleeful screwing up of it. Basically, one time in every four that I try to connect, my anti-virus software locks up. The only way out of it is to reboot the PC. I have to do this using the power button, because the lock-up is so bad I can't even call up Windows Task Manager (unless I call this up first, which I'm doing increasingly often now).

Norton's anti-virus software is a crock. It makes everything runs slow, except the stuff it fails to make run at all. Things are so bad, I'm wondering whether I might be better off risking a virus rather than running it. My main complaints are:

I was in PC World the other day and there was this harassed-looking woman with a pushchair looking at the display of anti-virus software. An oily sales assistant came up and asked her if she was considering something to protect her computer. He made the mistake of gesturing at the well-stocked Norton Anti-Virus display. She launched into an immediate tirade against it that was a joy to behold. As an IT professional, she was well aware of the danger of viruses, which is why she'd installed Norton back in 1997. She'd found the latest version such a problem that what she was "considering" now was anything but Norton. Norton made her 3.4MHz PC run like 700MHz and she was not happy. The sales assistant, attempting to defend the product, asked if she had firewall software installed. This was another error on his part, as she dived straight into an explanation of how she'd had to edit several initialisation files and the registry to get Norton Firewall to do what she wanted. At this point, I left; it was too uneven a contest, and I didn't want to end up feeling pity for the sales assistant.

Someone, somewhere, must be developing anti-anti-virus software. I'll buy it the moment it hits the stores.

Referenced by Cross-Version, Cross User.

Referenced by Lost Memories.

Referenced by Always On!.

Referenced by Catch up.


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Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).