WAY O/T A/V program

Always had Norton never had a problem. Latest seems great find everything I don't want but a bit of a pain in the ass to get up with out it asking questions. Yahoo offers a discount. Best to get CD then you can always have it instead of a file downloaded.

There are three good free for home use anti-virus products:

Avira AntiVir - My preferred anti-virus. It updates automatically almost every day and can be set to do full scans on a schedule. It does open a splash screen when it updates and this annoys some people. I don't mind it as I know I got an update if it happened while I wasn't at my computer.

AVG Antivirus - used this before AntiVir. Has been since updated.

Avast - haven't used this, but gets high praise from that do.

All three of these free packages get high marks from users and reviewers. I wouldn't touch Norton with your ten foot pole. It was once a good program, but now-a-days, it seems to cause almost as many problems as it prevents.

HTH Bill

Given the apparent plans for Windows Vista as far as code activation and other "Big Brother" features in that code, as well as the tightening grip of the new Office document format ("all your data are belong to us"); it is very possible that MSoft is going to start pushing people over the edge into the Linux world. I know that I will be very seriously looking at Linux for my next machine -- the only three apps that I have a problem with will be Mind Manager, Quicken, and TurboCAD. Everything else, there are alternatives in Linux. There may be Linux alternatives for Quicken, I just haven't looked very hard yet since I'm a ways off from having to upgrade computer systems.

One of the things that really pushed me was when I had to re-load my OS several months ago and the absolute pain of having to reinstall every application despite the fact that those apps were still present on the hard drive, they just didn't exist in the registry. Wouldn't have been an issue with a unix system -- just making sure the paths were correct and that if needed, the apprpriate license manager is running, and your back in business.

Good reads at

Note grammatical corrections (can't believe I did that!)

you're back in business

Well FWIW I've downloaded Windows programs and found they had no documentaion or 'tautological' documentation--e.g. "the copy command is used to copy files form one location to another."

What is really needed is an easy-to-use user interface and there are a few.

Indeed, IIUC, Apple's newer OS is a GUI built on top of Linux. Port that to PCs and you're in business.