Fixing my computer, one problem at a time

Since blogging yesterday about my computer problems, I've heard from several different people about the evils of Norton. And, admittedly, that's just a taste of the complaints I've found online. I sure wish I had researched Norton Antivirus better before renewing and upgrading my subscription — but, hey, my computer had come with Norton Antivirus 2005 installed on it, and I never had any problems with it back then!

I haven't accomplished any billable work yet this week, but my computer problem is close to being resolved. Yesterday — with my computer running painfully slow — I uninstalled Norton Antivirus 2008. This was after Norton's tech support responded to my demand for a refund (due to the virtual unavailability of customer support) with some troubleshooting instructions — not only did his instructions actually set the virtual memory to a smaller size than what my computer already runs, but my computer actually hung while following his troubleshooting instructions! By the time I got it up and running again, I was madder than ever, and responded that I was removing the software and wanted a refund.

So I spent yesterday removing every trace of Norton from my computer. Unfortunately, every time Norton has caused my computer to hang or crash, Outlook has been open — which I suspect has caused damage to the hard drive where the program was written, because I've been having a lot of problems with Outlook lately.

So a complete fix also required me to uninstall and reinstall Outlook. I spent the morning backing up my .pst file (good gravy that file takes a long time to back up!), and then uninstalled and reinstalled the software. Now I am waiting for Mozy to restore my backed-up .pst file — and hoping that the online backup service works the way it's supposed to!

The good news is that I'm not stressing out so much about it today. Rather, the down time of waiting for backups, installations, and un-installations has given me plenty of time to read. I've read at least 200 pages today (finishing one book and starting another), which has made my day pretty pleasant, despite all the computer problems!