Warning: NEEP!

I've had various versions of Norton Anti-Virus on my computer for years, but lately have wondered if it isn't taking up more space than warranted all this time. James abandoned Norton for AVG, which is a free virus-scanning software for individuals only (businesses must pay a fee) available at grisoft.com. AVG is highly touted by several reputable websites and also by the computer geek on the Atlanta newspaper.

Since James had messed with its "innards" so much during the upgrade, I took the opportunity Saturday to clean up the hard drive. I deleted all temp files and emptied the recycle bin and got rid of some other useless files, then booted the computer in safe mode, did a scan disk on drives C and D. (My hard disk is 20GB and divided into ten virtual drives, C through L. C is for Windows, D for the Internet, E for my publishing programs like WordPerfect, F for all the graphics programs, G  stereotypically enough for games, H for storage, I for MP3 storage, J for other larger programs and useful programs like Paradox and The Font Thing, and K for creative programs like the cross-stitch program and a greeting card maker. L is named "Fred" rather than Miscellaneous :-). I usually download programs to it before transferring them permanently to CD.) Then I defragged all the drives.

Expecting to now be zipping merrily along, I reboot normally. Activesync (for my PDA), AdSubtract, and Norton all load at startup and sit in my system tray. I click on System Resources and discover here I am with no programs on at all besides those already pre-loaded and my two system resources are already down to 75 percent and my GDI down to 80.

So I downloaded AVG, uninstalled Norton (boy, that thing hangs on; James walked me through going into the Windows Registry to remove a startup reference file that was still in the bootup sequence, leaving me with a chiding message from Windows each time I rebooted), and then installed AVG. How nice! Now on bootup I have 90 percent of both system resource measurements and 95 percent on my GDI.

Not only that, but along with the scan it does every time the computer boots up, AVG also did a complete initial system scan when it started up the first time and it found a possible Trojan Horse program in my files—from Lycos; that figures—and killed it. Norton updated constantly, did a deep scan once a week, and never found anything.

----------------------------------------------------------------
. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 12:06:00 PM

Comments: Post a Comment