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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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   Norton victim
Friday, September 14 2007
For some reason people have been calling me wanting computer housecall work and I've been taking it. Today I was up on Ohayo Mountain attending to another Norton victim. There's a lot of fuss about viruses and spyware, but these days most of the casualties seem to be coming from Symantec, the maker of Norton Anti-Virus, which usually comes embedded within a bloated suite of similar products. The latest incarnation of this unpleasant resource-hogging suite is Norton 360, which is evidently being sold by nagging balloons rising from the Task Bar, balloons launched by earlier versions of Norton Anti-Virus. Today's client had been so harried by these balloons that he'd followed their instructions and ended up spending $69 to fix something that wasn't broken.

I usually disable balloon tips on clients' Windows installations, since I've never seen a balloon tip that was helpful (and otherwise they lead to unnecessary client phone calls). Here's a fairly typical balloon tip: "There are unused icons on your desktop." Please.

In the process, though, this client had managed to break his computer. When I sat down to work on it, I found it unfixable. After trying for about a half hour to get it to operate without dying, I gave up and took it home with me. It turned out that it had a hardware problem screwing up communications with the SATA hard drive, a problem that might never have bubbled to the surface if Norton 360 hadn't tried to do so many things at such a low level.

I should mention, by the way, that antivirus software isn't essential for Windows computing. If you're behind a router, use Firefox, and you have enough sense not to follow the advice of emails, your computer will be fine. Gretchen has never had anti-virus software on her computer and it's never been infected. She's no computer expert, but she has common sense and knows enough to avoid following suggestions found in spam. If anything, my computer is the vulnerable one due to my interest in software that has been freed from the chains of capitalism. For this reason I am forced to use the freeware AVG antivirus program, which I use to scan suspicious files before launching them.


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