FORGET POETRY...I'M BECOMING A TECH GEEK: Okay, not really, but I am very pleased with myself. After spending Monday night in laptop hell, I decided that I was of sufficient intelligence that I could fix the problem. After about five hours, I did. My laptop is now running faster and with no hiccups at all. Part of the problem was not having Internet Explorer 7 installed, but the other was something that really shocked me. I have Norton Anti-virus running and I had scanned the laptop obsessively looking for viruses and malware, but the scan kept coming back with nothing. I couldn't solve the "script error" that kept popping up on some websites that I'd previously viewed with no trouble at all.

After doing some research in a few tech forums, someone suggested that the script error was indeed a bug and that Norton might not pick it up. They suggested downloading the free version of Ad-aware and running it. After over an hour of scanning with Ad-aware, I was stunned to find 13 bugs and a Trojan virus...all of which had been missed by Norton. My laptop is now zipping along. So good in fact, I'm thinking of delaying my purchase of a new laptop until after the first of the year.

Thanks to everyone who commented both here and back-channel about redirecting my .com site to this blog. I'm 99.9 percent convinced that is the way to go. I'll probably give the blog a bit of an overhaul at the beginning of the year.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Very cool. Happy Turkey Day. We're off to Vegas to gamble all of our xmas money.

GAV
nolapoet said…
Was that all?.... It is amazing how much frustration a loose Trojan can cause. ;-)

Happy Turkey Day,
Robin
Ah, if only it had been a Mac - immune to most of the viruses that plague those other things.
Tania Rochelle said…
I hope you have better luck with your overhaul. I'm sure you will--being that you're such a tech geek now.
Anonymous said…
Congrats! Hooray! My theory about Norton is that it, itself, is a kind of spyware...it runs in the background constantly and uses so much processor speed that, when I had my PC laptop, I kept it turned off. When that didn't work, I just uninstalled it. Thing ran better than ever after that.
Collin Kelley said…
I may not be as big a tech geek as I think I am. Last night, the laptop froze up, I had to force quit and when I finally got it back up it gave me a message that Windows had "just recovered from a serious error." There's still a new laptop in my future, I've just put it off a bit. And, yes, I'm still looking at Macs.
Anonymous said…
Welcome to Flickr! More photos, please :)

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