Norton? No thanks.

Well there's not point in having this blog if I don't use it to tell you how I feel about things, so here goes.

DO NOT BUY NORTON SECURITY PRODUCTS

They suck. I bought Norton Internet Security 2004 about a year ago, and installed it on my old computer. It worked, kind of. But it slowed everything down so much that I figured after a while that it was more hassle than it was worth. So I uninstalled it, and instead used the free Sygate personal firewall instead - and employed my native cunning and guile to steer clear of viruses (it's not all that difficult really - if you get an email from your boss that says something like "Fre brittany spears scrensvr" it's probably best not to click on the .vbs attachment).

A couple of weeks ago I had to buy a new computer. I was about to reinstall Sygate when I remembered the copy of Norton gathering dust in my drawer.

I decided to give it another go, and installed it. Because the new computer is a lot more powerful than the old one, it all worked just fine. Except for one thing: it kept making my system hang. A lot.

Like every time it detected an intrusion attempts. Like every time I tried to install anything. Like every time you started the computer up.

I tried, believe me. I followed the instructions for a clean uninstall from the Symantec website. This was fine - but when I tried reinstalling again to give it one last chance, it wouldn't install at all - and it killed my network connection into the bargain. It took an hour, but eventually I managed to get Norton off my system.

So I installed the free Sygate personal firewall and the free AVG antivirus programmes. Unlike Norton, nobody seems to have a bad word to say for either of them. They don't have all the bells and whistles that Norton does, but they don't hog all your RAM or make your system crash, either. And best of all, they don't cost £40, either.

How does Symantec get away with selling such utter crap, I wonder? And how does it justify $30 a call to the support team to solve the problems caused by its crappy software?

Seeing SARS

My walk to the Métro on my way home takes me up the Champs Elysées, so as you can imagine I see a few tourists. Usually they're just doing goofy stuff like trying to take photos that won't POSSIBLY work (like a shot of the Arc de Triomphe with the sun in front of them whilst standing in the middle of eight lanes of traffic, or a shot of the Louis Vuitton store (why?) 100m away with flash in the dark). But yesterday I saw something that made me stop in my tracks.

It was a young, Japanese chap walking down the road with his mate, whilst wearing a surgical mask.

Instantly I was taken back to my experience of SARS in Singapore a couple of years ago, and the attendant madness that went with it. I was taken to a world where it was quite unusual to see a Chinese person WITHOUT a mask, and where places liek the zoo and the Bird Park were pretty much deserted. I was back in a world where I had to have my temperature taken three times a week, where there was thermal imaging equipment checking you as you entered the airport, and where taxi drivers had to post their temperature readings on their dashboards twice a day. Put simply, I was back in a world of madness.

The explanation was a little less creepy - and actually quite sensible. Apparently it's quite common for Japanese people to don a mask if they get a cold, to stop it spreading. As I'm suffering from a bit of a cold myself today that I expect I caught from someone I was squashed up against on the Métro, that seems quite a good idea right now.

Does not compute

Well, that was a fun weekend. The computer I have at home has been making a terrible noise for some time (imagine the old tone you used to get when the TV stations shut down in the evening), and I thought it was time I did something about it. Now when a computer makes a whining noise it can be one of two things: the cooling fans (which are easy to fix and cheap to replace) or the hard drive (which is impossible to fix and still reasonably expansive to replace). Naturally this is me we’re talking about, so I realised after a bit of poking about inside the tower that it was time for a new hard drive.

I looked it all up on the Internet and discovered that it was quite easy. What I had to do, according to those diagrams which make everything from changing a battery to changing someone’s liver seem straightforward) was install the new hard disk, copy everything from the old one to the new one, take out the old one and Bob would be my uncle. No problem, right?

Wrong. I killed it. I put the new drive in OK, but then when it came time to restart so I could copy the old one to the new one, Windows wouldn’t load. Nothing I did, including putting everything back exactly how it was, did any good. And before too long the thing wouldn’t even start up at all.

Decision time. Now if we’d been in the UK, I’d have waited, taken it round to some tiny computer store and got it fixed (luckily I’m no Gary Glitter so I’d be more worried about them getting my banking details than anything else). But we’re in France – and the PC is at the centre of our lives.

That’s no exaggeration. Here’s list of things we use the PC for:

• The radio
• The news
• The newspaper
• The TV (via bittorrent)
• Games and things for Isobel
• Playing CDs

I’d been thinking about getting a new one for a while, actually. We bought this one in Singapore and it’s getting on a bit – plus of course it doesn’t really do them all that much good lugging them round the world in tropical heat before leaving them in storage for the best part of a year. It’s CD writer had dies a few months ago, it needed more RAM, blah blah blah.

So I went to get a new one. And it’s fantastic. The hard drive is 400% bigger, it’s faster, it has all the RAM I need and best of all, it’s as quiet as a mouse. Obviously I still have to find a way of getting everything off the old hard disk, but to be honest it’s just a bit of music, some photos and a couple of invoices that I really need – thanks to backing up reasonably regularly.