Does anyone else feel harassed by their computer???

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

(To get it out of the way: Yes, I don’t have the world’s fastest computer – it dates back to the release of WinXP, whenever that was. I’m also on dialup, which means sloooooooow, of course. Yes, I could cure either of those things with money, but right now that’s now in my budget priorities.)
Now, despite the above, this computer was acceptably zippy when I started using it. I don’t make great demands: I run several different wp programs, I use Eudora so I can read/write email without tying up the phone line, and I spend maybe an hour a day doing some casual surfing/research. Pretty minimal, yes? I mean, it’s not like I expect it to handle cutting edge games or do heavy graphic work. Just let me read my mail and write and surf in peace, is that too much to ask?

Apparently so. :frowning:

Here’s how this current session has gone:

Switch on computer. After an annoyingly long bootup time, an icon appears in the tray with a popup window informing that there are UPDATES READY TO DOWNLOAD. Just CLICK HERE!

Joy, joy. I downloaded and installed over 15 megs worth of Microsoft updates no more than ten days ago. It took well over an hour, counting several reboots. No, No, NO! I do not want to update right now! Go away, naggy window! :mad: <click>

I start to mouse to the icon to dial up mindspring – and before I can get there, another popup window! This one is from Norton. It, too, has updates! Can we get them now, huh? Huh? HUH? Noooo, I moan. For one thing, we aren’t connected to the internet yet, you idiot. You couldn’t DL updates even if I said yes.

But I don’t say yes. I firmly click no and head for the dialup icon again. This time I manage to click it just before the next popup appears. This one is from something called a startup monitor. It appears that since I thwarted Norton, it now wants to put something in the startup routine so it can nag me about the update next time, too. Do I want to allow this change? <sigh> Well, in the past I have answered this question both ways, many, many times. So far as I can tell, it has no affect on anything: Norton WILL nag me next time, there is no escape from that fate. I randomly click on one of the choices yet again.

Ah, dialup has done it’s magic and I am connected to the world. Good stuff. Eudora cheerily informs me that 45 people love me enough to have sent me advice about improving my sex life. Eudora immediately DLs the first of these messages…and things grind to a halt again. Time passes, very, very slowly. After about 30 seconds Eudora tells me the system on the other end has hung up on me.

This doesn’t drive me to swearing because I expect it to happen. As best as I can tell, what happens is that Eudora informs Norton, or maybe Norton snoops all by itself, but that first message sends Norton into a panic. My god, a message has arrived! Ooogah! Ooogah! All hands on deck! Norton begins to thrash through all its myriad files, hunting for the instructions on what to do with messages, loading whatever new programs are needed for this unusual event, then gropes for the list of checks to run on the mail… And, while doing this, it keeps muttering at Eudora/Mindspring ‘just a minute, just a minute, I’m not ready, hold on…’ I know it does this, because it leaves little notes in the header on the 2nd message, something like Timeout prevention by Norton Number 1. Then the same number 2, and on up to ten times.

Despite these efforts, Mindspring gets tired of waiting and hangs up. So eventually Norton gets its act in gear, discovers that the first message really wasn’t a fiendish virus, and lets Eudora display it – along with the message that the remote computer has hung up. <sigh>

As I said, I’ve gotten used to this: it happens on the first mail run after booting up, each and every time. :frowning: I click on the ‘dl’ mail icon again. Eudora starts, notices the lack of connnection, and kicks the dial up back into action. Reconnect, announcement that I have N-1 messages waiting. Sucks down the first of them. Pause. Pause. Pause. Twenty seconds pass …and just when I expect this second attempt to fail, too, Norton finally gets it together enough to process the first message and lets Eudora grab the second. And the third. Now the pause between messages is only 2-3 seconds, so I manage to get my mail.

Of course, the mail program I ran back when I used a Kaypro II was at least a hundred times faster than this Eudora/Norton botch, but, hey, that’s progress, right?

Oooh, another popup! Haven’t seen this one before…It says there’s a new version of the Microsoft Antispyware program waiting for me to dl. Petulantly I click it off the screen. Leave me alone! I want to read my mail!

Along about the fourth offer from Hot, Horny Housewives – and in MY neighborhood! – my computer slows to nearly dead. Now what? Oh, another helpful icon awaits. This one claims I have scheduled an antispyware check to run now. ARRRRRRRGHHH.
The killer is that today is not at all unusual: Update IE. Update Windows. Update Norton. Update all the other programs that are supposed to let me use my computer safely but in concert keep me from being able to simply USE my computer. Run the spybot scans, run the Norton whole disk scan, run god knows what all else.

I swear, given my slow computer and slow dial up, it’s not unusual for a bout of ‘updating’ to require four hours before everything is finally happy.

And even after blowing an entire evening catering to the computer, within a week the endless nagging starts again.
New update, Boss! Can we get it, huh? Now? No? How about NOW?
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

2

Your problem as odd as it seems, isn’t dialup or Windows. It’s Norton. Norton sucks ass. Get rid of it, and get Symantec.

3

:confused: Symantec makes Norton.

A good, free option is AVG.

Some other programs I would recommend in order to make your browsing and mail experience more comfortable: Firefox web browser and Thunderbird mail program. Both are free, play well together, and will decrease your computer-related headaches.

4

If I may suggest something:

It sounds to me like the biggest problem you have is an older, slower hard drive. I recently had my main hard drive die on me and replaced it with a new one. I was amazed at the difference that it made in the time it took to start up programs. Hard drives are quite cheap – I seem to recall that mine was 80 GB for $80 CDN. Of course, you’d have to reinstall all of your programs, which can be a pain. But it might be worth it if it can save you all of this aggravation.

Of course, YMMV. I suspect that some of the speed increase I saw may have been because my old hard drive was failing and often had to correct for errors on reads.

5

I want a setting on my computer: “Do not let anything steal focus from Civilization IV unless the computer is on fire.”

6

Honest to God, whatever you do, do what is in the quoted thread.

  1. Upon advice from my question on this, AVG was very much recommended for my problem. I got it. I have never since had a problem with it.
  2. As said above, and in other threads, Norton is EVIL. I got a call from my wifey last week about stragne goings-on in her computer. After she wasted half a day, guess what? It was Norton. This Friday, when I am home for a few hours before we go on our Caribbean Cruise, I an UNINSTALLING Norton, and getting AVG.

Please believe me, I have been there, and I have seen the elephant. Norton is EVIL! It will seriously mess you up/

7

Ditto on XJETGIRLX’s statement. After installing Firefox get the Adblock and Flashblock extensions. They will save you headaches on dial-up

8

Dang, StarvingButStrong, that sucks!

I hope you get a computer that doesn’t get slower over time (at least not so rapidly) and doesn’t make you feel in any way “harassed”. No one should have to put up with that! I’ve always found that computers get faster for the first few years, and only start to seem to be slowing down as operating system and applications demand more than an aging computer is capable of producing.

And I, too, have always heard that Norton sucks and should not be used.

9

Thank you all for the replies! Since it seems almost unanimous that Norton is at least a big chunk of the problem, I will start there. (Hopefully it at least has a good uninstall program.)

And I’ll get that AVG.

I’m not sure about Firefox. I tried it several years ago and had to keep starting up IE almost every browsing session because something or other would refuse to play with Firefox. Maybe that has changed.

Anyway. Thanks again, for trying to save a bit of my sanity.

10

I’ve used Firefox for a couple years now, and I’d say I only need to open IE to view something, oh, a couple times a year. Most of the pages I visit work well in both, and in the rare instance they don’t there is a great little extension for Firefox called IEview which will allow you to quickly open the selected link or page in IE without disturbing your browsing session.

Personally, after getting used to tabbed browsing, and my own personal set of preferred extensions and greasemonkey user scripts, I feel naked using anything else! Give it a test drive and see if it’s not better than the last time you tried it. I think you’ll like it.

11

You might also want to hunt down the settings for Windows’ automatic updates and set them to either Notify Me, or Turn off Automatic Updates. With XP, it’s in the Security Center item in the Control Panel. This way, you don’t get knocked sideways while the thing’s tring to download 17 meg of patches over dialup.

12

In addition to the great advice already about AVG, Firefox and Thunderbird:

If you don’t already have them, get Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware SE Personal. Install them, update them, run them, and then repeat the updating and running process at least once a week.

Spyware will, to an amazing degree, slow your computer down. Once you clean out all the gunk, it’ll run a lot smoother.

Try these things (which are all free) before you go out and purchase new hardware or spend money on upgrades.

Also, you’ll want to defragment your existing harddrive, after you clean it up with the anti-virus and anti-malware programs. PerfectDisk is an excellent defrag tool.