For those that don't know about Microsoft's latest update..

[Head Boy]

I haven't required any support from Microsoft ever. I notice that they had to buy another company to try to prevent their current OS from being infected/corrupted, so I suspect they aren't too well informed about the activities of their in-house coders.

98 re-calibrates it's cache fairly frequently unless you tell it not to. Just go into virtual memory and set it to a fixed size.

HS - a few things about Norton make you suspect that they are not too stessed about people getting infected - it probably means they can sell them a bit more stuff or an upgrade.

[RawAlex]

airdick, XP home is just not as robust, there are things in the way it looks at networking, system control, etc that are just not the same as XP pro, and it leads to "issues". My sister is a horribly bad computer person, shares a system with 2 kids a hubby that is even worse. They had XP home, I was up there every other week fixing something, patching whatnot. reformated the system completely, put on xp pro, and all of those issues just went away.

Now if I could just get them to stop downloading spyware, we would have something.

Alex

[cd34]

I installed W2k3 Enterprise the other day. When it gets done, it asks you if you want to connect to the mothership to download updates.

The first box that pops up says: windowsupdate.microsoft.com is not a trusted site. You should only allow sites that you trust to be moved into this zone. It did this about 4 times with different .microsoft.com hostnames associated with the upgrade.

Sort of makes you feel all warm inside when even Microsoft doesn't trust Microsoft sites.

[Head Boy]

Any "professional" that uses Norton products loses all my respect. When I was installing and maintaining networks I would refuse to work on any system that had any Norton product on it. They just caused too many problems. In most cases removing Norton fixed the problems anyway. It now seems to be impossible to remove Norton though.

Norton are still spamming, and it's only benefit seems to be in providing employment for local businesses that offer a virus removal service for home computer users.

[amber438]

Norton's is a pain in the ass, very true. Unfortunately people are afraid to try other things if they've used it for years and "love" it.
Refusing to work on a system that uses it, tho, is imho not exactly condusive to business if you are in the business of working on computers and networks. I'd never recommend it to begin with. I try to convince people to switch to something less intrusive, say panda or avp or something else, and give them reasons why. That usually works. But if they won't, well I'd never turn them down.
I have a system I use to test different things and I tested Nortons system works 2005, pos (piece of shit). 2004 firewall really blocks a lot of stuff but, like all the rest of nortons, is very intrusive and slows the pc down quite a bit.
Norton's has a tool to remove it but it never really does get all the nasty little bits it leaves behind. If it becomes a problem, I wipe out the pc and be done with it. That usually convinces people to change.

[SinSational]

i let the xp auto-updates run. haven't had any issues yet (fingers crossed).

[tortus32]

Holy crap!

After reading this whole post, I'm sure glad I'm on a Mac - LOL!!

Bill

[tortus32]

I seem to have a talent for bringing posts to a screeching hault - lol!

Bill