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Machine issues…


Hrm… I always knew that I disliked Norton Antivirus
(now Symantec Antivirus) but I’ve never had any proof besides a hunch that was
formed during the early 90’s after seeing their products at work.  On
monday my already ailing work computer started to die.  The “System”
process suddenly started using 99% of the cpu time and I had very little way to
find out why.  (I’m not an XP guru by any means so besides opening up the
task manager and seeing which process was hogging my CPU, I was clueless) 
I decided that trying to end the task would not be a good idea. (After all,
isn’t the System process going to be some microsoft internal thingy?)


Since I didn’t have huge deadlines and my pc was kinda stuffed to start with
(errors in explorer.exe when shutting down, IIS didn’t work at all, I kept
losing icons from my task bar, and a few other odd things like not being able to
install some internal apps we use because their activex controls “weren’t
registered” even though they were)… So I re-installed my pc. 
Unfortunately just after installing MS’s Antispyware Beta and Symantec AV, the
problem of the 99% cpu usage started again.  So I uninstalled MS’s
Antispyware Beta, and the problem was still there.  Unfortunately I
couldn’t uninstall Symmantec’s AV because our company policy enforced by
Symantec is that I can’t uninstall it without entering in a
password.  Eventually I tracked someone down who knew the password,
and the problem was solved.   So I’m now running McAfee’s AV software.
 YAY!


Oh, and in the re-install I lost my usual blogging tool – an old
(pre-commercial) version of BlogJet… So I installed IMHO, and I actually
managed to get it to work. (I told you my PC was stuffed, so I think it had
something to do with that that caused me to not be able to use it before) 
Anyway, it seems super cool.  So I think I might just become a regular IMHO
user.



powered by IMHO 1.2

Posted in General.

By Paul
July 7, 2005

1 comment

One Response

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  1. Craig Nicholson said
    on July 15, 2005

    As a note, I too used to use NAV… but I’ve discovered something cooler than all of them… avast! Antivirus. Try it out … http://www.avast.com. Its free for personal use as well and cheaper for businesses than McAfee and Symantec.