Freshening the notebook
I bought this Toshiba Satellite back in 2001 for the princely sum of $889, marked down from the kingly sum of $1299 because there was a small dent in the plastic case and the floppy door tended to stick. It’s accompanied me on all the subsequent World Tours plus various and sundry other activities, and it’s probably getting near the end of its lifespan, but that doesn’t give me any excuse to let it just die. So I’ve spent much of this weekend giving it the once-over, or, given the number of reboots involved, perhaps the thrice-over.
The box came with Norton’s brand of antivirus, which I dutifully upgraded as needed up through 2006 or so, at which point Symantec demanded not only its annual vig but also the installation of newer and bloatier bloatware, whereupon I yanked their plug and went for something that wouldn’t cost me anything: AVG’s Free package, then in 7.x.
It worked well enough at first, but the mandatory upgrade to version 8 was convoluted, and scan time (for a mere 8 GB of files) grew from an hour and a half (Norton had taken about 2:10) to an appalling 6:20. Worse yet, some of its behind-the-scenes machinations were sucking the very life out of the poor little box:
I’ve still got an old Compaq Presario 1200 notebook that refuses to die. I use it for basic stuff like the surfing the Internet and word processing when I’m on the road. It’s got 320MB of RAM (which is the maximum) and has been running just fine under Windows XP Pro.
After installing AVG 8 all that changed. The notebook acted like I had reinstalled Windows 2000 on it. Anything I did from the desktop, like launching Windows Explorer, or from the Start button, like launching the Control Panel applet, suddenly took 10-15 times longer.
Unfortunately, disabling some of AVG 8′s new modules did nothing to improve the performance problem.
My Toshiba has 512MB (that’s all I can cram in there; it came with 256), but the symptoms were identical.
So I pulled AVG and am embarking on a 30-day trial of ESET’s NOD32. Its footprint is way less than the Sasquatchian AVG’s, and it wound up its first complete scan in a fairly average-sounding 1:47, though this figure may have been affected by the fact that between its installation and the commencement of that scan, I installed Service Pack 3 to Windows XP. (No guts, no glory.)
For the curious: 20 GB disk space, one optical drive (reads DVD, writes CD-R/CD-RW), two USB 1.1 ports (no 2.0, alas). Processor is Intel’s Celeron at 1.1 GHz.
McGehee »
20 September 2008 · 9:24 pm
If the door sticks, that’s not very floppy. And why does your laptop even have a door?
</never seen an A:\> prompt>
CGHill »
20 September 2008 · 10:02 pm
Keeps the dust out of the case. (And if it sticks, it probably keeps more dust out of the case.)
Floppy drives were merely an endangered species in 2001. By 2004, last time I replaced a desktop, they were special-order only, at least at that particular store.
Aniwarp »
21 September 2008 · 8:21 am
Perhaps you should try Avast? I went there when AVG did their 8.0 “update”, and have no problems with it.
Aniwarp »
21 September 2008 · 8:22 am
Oh, and you still owe Wamprat and myself a meal. :-)
CGHill »
21 September 2008 · 8:54 am
Or two.
I may keep Avast in mind for next time CA on the desktop pisses me off, which will probably be some time in January, inasmuch as my license expires in February.
McGehee »
21 September 2008 · 9:29 am
In my house, my wife’s desktop is the only one to still have a FDD. Recently her mother e-mailed me about a bunch of 3.5s she wanted to do something with, but she wanted to make sure they didn’t still have sensitive personal data on them — and she said there’s not a FDD to be found in her house since she fired the (soon-to-vanish) Gateway store and bought her current bugbox.
(It didn’t occur to me at the time to ask if her laptop, which is older than the first laptop we ever had — we’re on our third now — still has one. Hmmm…)
McGehee »
21 September 2008 · 9:30 am
(And by “soon-to-vanish” I mean she replaced that computer shortly before the stores disappeared.)