Somewhere around this time last year we lost patience with the Norton internet security package. It’d become too slow, and rather flaky on both of our machines. So, we researched and went over to the Kaspersky package. It was much faster. It was also quiet and completely well-behaved.
For almost the whole year we were satisfied. Then, a few weeks back, Graham’s computer, running Windows XP, started acting up. It seemed most likely that it was down to Kaspersky getting close to the end of its subscription so Graham bought a new copy and installed it over the old one.
Then the problems really started, with the program acting up in the strangest of fashions. We researched, and found that many other users were reporting the same troubles after updating the product.
I was due to upgrade my copy this last week and found myself strangely reluctant to stick with Kaspersky. It’s way of popping up a subscription expiry window many times a day, interrupting the flow of my “work” didn’t help at all.
“I think I’ll go back to Norton,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of struggling with the technology at my age.”
“Nothing to do with age,” Graham replied. “Get a multi-user copy and I’ll go back, too.”
Long stories are best cut short so I’ll just say that I Amazoned a new copy of Norton on Christmas Eve, it arrived this morning, I deleted Kaspersky and installed the new baby. It was a completely painless delete/install and my computer, running Windows Vista, seems to have taken on a new lease of life, swift as a speeding bullet you might say. The difference is most marked at start-up, which runs faster than ever before.
So there you are. I’m back safely in the arms of Norton and happy with it. Your experience may differ, of course, especially with Vista, which everyone in the world seems to hate except for me.
And here we all are at the end of one year and getting closer and closer to the start of a new one. I can’t say that 2011 has been our best year, though there have been enough happy times to balance out all but the worst of the bad ones. Here in the little house in the Pines Graham and I are hoping for a better year in 2012 and we both of us send you all our best wishes for the same. Things, as the song would have it, can only get better.
Happy New Year!
