The fragility of it all
So I got home, fired up the old (well, the newer) desktop box, and about three minutes into the session the power glitched enough to send my UPS into spasms. The machine rebooted, as it is wont to do, and nothing much was remarkable about the process.
Except that one of Windows’ irritating little balloons popped up, telling me that my antivirus program was turned off. (I won’t mention any names, but its initials are CA.) I duly cranked up the program’s Screen of Woe, and sure enough, Real-Time Protection and Email Protection had been toggled off. I toggled them back on, and of course a reboot was demanded; nothing much was remarkable about the process.
And one of Windows’ irritating little balloons popped up, telling me that my antivirus program was turned off. Same situation as before. This time I hit up the support options, and for a change, there were some. The first offering: a quick-and-dirty downloadable patch, which installed in a matter of seconds. Reboot. No results. Next step: a less-quick, less-dirty, patch that comes with someone typing in a corner of your screen at you if things get bad enough. I fired it up, and it decided things weren’t bad enough: it sent me another, different patch, which worked just as well as the previous one.
At this point I was about to call Hair Club for Men, just so I’d have something to rip out in frustration. I downloaded a fresh copy of the install (110 MB, geez), and uninstalled the existing version. First uninstall screen was to reproach me for taking out something that had saved or uncreated 125,000 viruses. I hit the Too Bad button, and out it went. Reboot.
I did the reinstall, fishing my registration number out of the email drawer, and it went well enough until registration was demanded. It took me rather a long time to figure this one out: in the process of not ripping my hair out, I had gotten my 2008 registration code, which perforce had expired, and they wanted a large sum of money to extend the subscription.
By now an hour and a half had passed, I hadn’t gotten to dinner, and I’d managed only a feeble tweet on the subject. Apparently what had happened was that the power failure had occurred during a download of software updates, resulting in some unspecified number of corrupted files, one of which was the actual updating engine, so I couldn’t retrieve those updates, and the product shut itself down lest something horrible happen. Evidently CA puts the “bust” in “robust.”
I have six and a half months left on this license. At the moment, I am disinclined to renew.
McGehee »
25 July 2009 · 11:56 am
Have you tried Avast — er, “avast!”?
CGHill »
25 July 2009 · 12:23 pm
I think I’ve tried everything that starts with “AV”, up to and including Aversion and Avalanche.
I’ll probably switch to Eset, which is already on my notebook.
David »
25 July 2009 · 5:57 pm
I’ve been liking ClamWin on my single Windows box, with “real” ClamAV on my Linux boxes. And an old, old copy of IBM-AV on my OS/2 servers.
ms7168 »
26 July 2009 · 8:36 am
So you had that power failure too! I was in the shower when the lights suddenly went out. Fortunately there was just enough daylight coming through to keep me from being in total darkness. Then this other anomaly whenever the power goes out my water pressure drops by half. Fortunately it didn’t change in temperature but it was much weaker. In a few minutes it returns to normal.
Why did the UPS have to reboot it? Mine just keeps it up seamlessly unless the power outage is five minutes or more.
CGHill »
26 July 2009 · 10:02 am
I think the UPS is just getting old: these things are based on lead-acid batteries, and anyone who owns a car knows they won’t last forever.
Scooby214 »
26 July 2009 · 10:04 pm
I second the recommendation for avast! antivirus. I used to have CA on my machines, but have found that Avast seems to pick up on things that CA would miss.
I’ve also once had Norton, and wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I had it installed on a new machine last year, and recently received an email stating that they would be charging my credit card for an automatic renewal. I went to the website and was able to turn off the auto renewal, but couldn’t remove my credit card info.
Scott »
27 July 2009 · 2:55 pm
I’m wondering if anyone has conclusively shown that you get better protection from a paid service than you do from a free one, like AVG Free or NOD32 Free. I used the former, and still put it on my family’s machines, and I’m using the latter on my newest laptop in kind of a test mode. So far, none of them have had any issues, but I wonder if that’s my ceaseless exhortations of “don’t click that:” to my sainted mother. I get a few phone calls about whether she can click, but it’s easier than cleaning up the mess if she didn’t.