Computer Stuff

Well, I finally bit the bullet and installed SP2 on my PC. I was getting sick and tired of it constantly popping up and "reminding" me that I had updates to install. Damn machine has all the persistence of a two-year-old asking for a glass of juice. Anyway, so, yeah, I finally installed it, and then promptly went in and turned most of the features off. I've already got a perfectly good firewall, thanks, and I'm quite capable of monitoring my own anti-virus software. Heck, Norton practically monitors itself. Anyway, nothing's crashed so far, so yay.

Speaking of Norton Anti-Virus, by the way, I also upgraded from the 2002 to 2005 version. But, man, is it just me, or does Symantec seem to want to make it difficult to buy their products? Every time I've tried to buy an upgrade or a renewal from them, it's been a hassle. Their webpage says the program itself will walk you through a renewal, but all it does is ask you for a subscription key. Which you have to order your renewal through the website to get. But there's no obvious link on their website that takes you to a place where you can do that. If you go searching for one, you end up with a "helpful" AI which is supposed to answer your questions. It'll give you a link, but if you click on it, you get an error. Aaargh! It must've taken me half an hour just to figure out how to renew my subscription (at which point, I discovered that it'd actually be cheaper to upgrade, so it became kind of pointless, anyway). There are people at Symantec who clearly need to be beaten with a stick.