Hilarious! ??????

A while back I had realized that my laptop was underperforming and went through a lot to get it back up to speed.  One issue was that for some reason Windows will cut your CPU performance in half if your power setting is set to laptop.  Lesson learned again:  you must lie to Windows.

However, since through work I had access to the right tools, I decided to go to zero and work my way back up.  I made a straight dupe of my hard drive and then wiped the original and installed XP on it again, though I held off on certain updates that I knew were subpar.  I had since signed up with Comcast for internet service and went ahead and installed their free Norton Security Suite, which was by no means sweet.

When I went to reinstall any software with a USB interface Windows could not figure out the drivers.  This led me to buy a newer mp3 player even though my previous one was fine.  However, I could not ever get my Mbox with ProTools back until I started thinking about what was different this time than the other times I had installed this in the past.  The difference was that Norton shit.  I uninstalled it and suddenly everything was able to work right again.  Not only that but my performance ramped up noticeably, startup and shutdown went faster...everything told me that Norton was a mistake.

At some point I looked for some free antivirus software, but when I installed that it hung up the first time, then when I uninstalled it there were tons of files left behind.  I had to find their uninstall patch that they had to come up with because everyone was complaining about the same thing.

I mention all of this now because recently I had some suspicious stuff going on like performance lags and a file on my digital camera going corrupt that ended with my having to reformat the memory stick.  I feared a virus so I went back to Comcast for the Norton stuff.  I was then able to verify that I had no virus, but half the other shit in that software just didn't work, would hang my system up, and sucked all the life from my laptop. On top of that any time I plugged in a USB device the whole thing dove in a major fashion.  So once again I had to uninstall it.

If I ever do have an issue I can once again spend hours downloading the crap, running a scan and then uninstalling it, but it really seems to cause more trouble than it even comes near solving.