So far today.

[swestrup]

Well, I got up, had some coffee, then made coffee, then drank some more coffee, then drank some more coffee, then made tea, then drank tea, then drank tea, then drank tea, then drank tea.

So, the score is currently: Coffee: 3, Tea: 4, and its looking like Tea is gonna win again!

In other stuff, I've spent the day reading up on NT security, permissions, ACLs and such so that I can figure out what happened to destroy the last installation. So far its looking like it wasn't actually my fault. The stuff that I was doing is not only supported by the OS, its considered a very maintenance action, so I've ended up looking further afield. From what I can now surmise, the actual problem was caused two days earlier when we had a sudden power outage due to a neighborhood house catching fire. This caused a minor error on two partitions of my hard drive. The problem was exacerbated when I (okay, so this bit IS my fault) believed Norton Disk Doctor 2003 that it knew how to repair NTFS drives. It did fix the E: partition and I've not had any more problems with it, but every time it went to fix the C: partition it found more errors until it (and the whole OS) simply died.

As a result, this time around I'm abandoning Norton. I always have thought that the various Norton tools were a bit shoddy, but I've been too lazy to find functional replacements. Since the two main tools I use have been the anti-virus and the system status toolbar, I've been looking for replacements. I have found an extensible status toolbar replacement here, but its a bit amateurish. Still, its not even to V1.0 yet, so it may be too early to judge.

So, now that I understand more of how the multi-user start menu works in XP, I'm feeling confident in going and organizing things again.  Now, if I could only find a competant and totally free anti-virus suite I would be happy. I'm currently using the free AVG from grisoft but its not very good IMHO and I would really like to replace it with something better. Sourceforge shows at least 6 open source AV programs in development, but none are yet ready for prime time. Does anyone have any suggestions? Remember, I host a company website on this machine, so the thing has to be free for commercial use, or its not really free for me.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

It says it's version 1.03....

Sidebar thingy.

[sps.livejournal.com]

So aside from the formatting of the weather, I thought it was quite professonal-looking. But at 40M and a four minute load, I don't think it's staying on my laptop.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if it's because of the size of the installed base or just how often the error comes up, but Norton AV breaks one's ability to gather email *very* often; judging by my statistics, about 1/1000 chance per day. The problem persists even in the new versions, so it hasn't been fixed.