Technical Issues

About a year ago I gave my 15-year-old son my old notebook computer, a circa 2001 Sony Vaio. It had served me well, but it was so heavy (funny how quickly our perceptions change). I just couldn’t bear it any longer.

As a safety precaution and in order to be sure there was no electronic-flotsam adhering to the hard disk, I wiped it clean by reinstalling the operating system. When I had done this before the time consuming nature of a full reinstall was never the most daunting part – the problems always seemed to come up when I had to make decisions about the security programming. Windows XP doesn’t like it when it has to fight with other programs for operational superiority. This is not an accusation, just a pragmatically accepted fact. A few years ago I had started using Norton’s Internet Security program which bundles a number of control features with anti-virus protection. I generally liked the program and felt it protected me well, but was regularly frustrated by conflicts between automatic updates and Windows XP. I became a serial “System Restorer.” I had to back out of updates so often that I started to worry that my virus protection was fatally incomplete.

But earlier this year…

I upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2006 (I swear to you, this is not a compensated commercial message). OMG, someone over at Norton evidently felt my pain. This program has been running perfectly, updating perfectly, and intercepting malicious invaders perfectly for me for two whole months. The key seems to be that it “learns” how to handle access to and from your computer. Somehow this has ended the “fight” between my security program and Windows.

I am thankful for this feature today because I had to wipe my now 16-year-old son’s computer again this morning. He had lost the ability to access the internet months ago, but hadn’t been able to fix the problem. I tried all of my own best tricks, but had not luck either. I thought about how well the updated security software had performed for me on my laptop, and decided to upgrade his security program as well.

Now the old Vaio runs like a champ. Hey, it runs so well that I am thinking I should get it out of my son’s bedroom and move it to the kitchen so I can blog while I eat my breakfast every morning. Hmmmmm.