Jimbo (and Jaywild too), I happened to check in with my favorite computer guru on a work related issue, and so I asked him about Norton's and McAfee, and alternate choices.
He told me that those two, in the Home versions, are incredible resource hogs, slowing down computers, as you already know. He ranked Norton's as the better of the two, but with both having serious problems. The business versions, he feels, are much better for speed but I don't think he loads Norton on the machines he builds, although he did in the past, as a free six month trial offer.
Unfortunately I really didn't get his recommendation of a substitute, but it wasn't Grisoft or Zone Labs, a couple alternatives worth investigating (for anybody out there who's looking). We went on to discuss the work related issues and didn't get back to the antivirus discussion.
As far as slowing down the computer is concerned, mine handles Norton's quite well, so no worries, but my machine was assembled for speed, for gaming.
I've also got a spare video card like yours, the AGP GeForce 5200 (Light Version) which turned out to be a really good card. I used it for a few weeks as a substitute when my primary video card was down, and it handled a sophisticated military flight game (IL-2 Sturmovik, at that time in about it's third generation version) with ease. All I needed was a fan for my old card, but it took five weeks or more to receive the fan, so the second card came in handy, and it ran so well I kept it as a backup.
Paul, thanks for the financial opinion. It's an area where I sure don't know the answers. I thought, for example, that after the first Iraq war we'd see rampant inflation, so we could pay for the war with cheap dollars.
I had no idea, though, that the US had quietly submitted a bill to the Saudis for the cost, $50 billion, and they paid it!
This time who knows.
Of course, we see glowing reports on the economy, but when over $650 billion dollars has been pumped in for the war, how could we NOT have a good economy? That unpaid bill is lurking in the background so the long term effect might be a lot different than the short term effects, but honestly I just don't know what to think for sure.
Same for the stock market, glowing reports of new highs. But the old highs have only recently surpassed highs from six years ago, that's a long time to wait just to break even!
Also, I might have misunderstood a recent report that said -if I did get it right - that the top 50 fund managers(?) all earned $240 million each or more as income. That's individual pay, not firms. Disregarding the "or more", that's still $120 billion in profits sucked out of the system by just 50 people. Any former Young Turks in that group, do you suppose?
At least we didn't "invest" in mint zepps in 1980. Filling one's shelves with albums and enjoying the chase for stamps in large quantities might have actually turned out to be more than just fun, in comparison.
I'd be more concerned about the whole financial situation if I actually had any money!
-Dunc
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on May-13-07
at 22:59:02 PDT
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on May-13-07
at 22:26:18 PDT
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on May-13-07
at 20:08:34 PDT
member 
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I'm a silly little man - whoopee!!
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on May-11-07
at 09:54:47 PDT
stellaland
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