Friday, May 12, 2006

The Laptop Revival

Last night at around 9pm I decided to start the process of reformatting my hard drive. I bought a new memory chip and it SHOULD be on it's way. I dumped the contents of my hard drive onto the external USB Hard drive we have. It took 120 minutes to dump it, mostly because of my 3 gig iTunes Library.

Then I couldn't find my restore disks. I thought I had my husband's (his laptop is almost identical, same brand and series, but more memory and a dvd burner.) Finally discovered that it was my restore disks I had found, but some of my software was "missing" and husband found it in his car, which although suspicious, he promises he didn't use it, so I believe him. (because I know he couldn't install it with my code because he would have to call Microsoft to authenticate and they would know he wasn't me.)

So once I restored the hard drive, I was SOOO thrilled with how fast it was. It only took half the time to dump the same stuff back onto the hard drive, which was awesome. I reinstalled Office 2003, got my firewall and antivirus on there... and then got my windows updates done, which were HUGE as there were 45 for XP including SP2 since the original restore disks were made.

I noticed that AS SOON as I put Norton 2006 on there, my computer started to bog down and take twice as long to start, and twice as long to respond to clicks. That Fucking program. I don't understand?! It doesn't do that on my home PC. The whole laptop us up and looks ready but you can't click anything because Norton hasn't loaded yet. I don't want to remove it from the startup because I want it working. But I am tempted to uninstall it and go free of virus protection. I don't have any problems with a Zone Alarm firewall/Norton Antivirus combo on either of the other two PC's that I am running it on, but Norton bogs down Zone alarm something terrible on this laptop. Even after completely reformatting. How frustrating!

I have noticed that especially the new "Norton Protection Center" is causing issues in Norton 2006. As a default, it shows the window each time you start your computer. WTF? uh. No! So I disabled that and all other Norton Protection Center Alerts. Whatever. Get off my back. I also removed as many system tray icons and pop-up alerts as possible. As an advanced user I don't need all that crap. It's really frustrating. So hopefully that will help. I also turned off the integration between Norton and Zone Alarm, since Norton thinks it needs to monitor my firewall. It doesn't. Zone Alarm is perfectly able to handle itself and I don't need DOUBLE pop ups and notifications for firewall activity. We will see, but I bet you Norton doesn't last long on this machine. If I haven't ripped it off in the next two days it will be a miracle.

Now I need to get all my greasemonkey extensions and other firefox extensions installed on the laptop, and iTunes. Then next will be all the graphic and web design programs. And then we will see what happens. Hopefully when I put the new memory in (hopefully tonight!) it will just hum right along. Right now it's hard to have Adobe Photoshop, and Dreamweaver open at once, let along the 10 programs I can have open at work or home on 512mb. I can't WAIT for a GIG! Yippee!

:) Have a lovely evening!
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just added a new hard drive and changed the power supply on mine. I was running out of room and it was getting slower by the minute. I didn't realize how sick it was until I formated. I don't like Norton at all. It slows my system down bad! I like this one pretty well. .... http://www.trendmicro.com/en/home/us/home.htm and they have an online spyware scan that took the place of the other spyware programs I used to install on my computer.

Anonymous said...

I may need you to look at my computer sometime and tell me if I need new more memory or one of those external USB drives to store stuff, you are soo good at that stuff

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