It seems that things go in phases. I will have times when everything I touch seems to fall apart and/or not go right, then I have times when everything falls in place. It makes me crazy when things don’t go right, but over the last week, things seem to be going my way. I am doing more and more consulting on my own, so in my spare time, when I’m not at church, I’m usually somewhere else troubleshooting someone’s PC.
3 different PC fixes for 3 different people all seem to be successful. I’m happy about that, very happy, since just before this, things did not fall into place so easily.
PC#1 was a power issue, random shutdown and locking up. I determined that it was either the power supply or the cpu fan/heatsink, so I replaced the power supply, put in a nice 500w power supply. Once installed, it was still shutting down and upon closer inspection, I determined that one of the plastic clips on the heatsink had broken, since that what plastic does, so I replaced the heatsink, no more plastic clips. I let it run awhile, still shutting down! What?!? It got to where it wouldn’t even turn on. I knew the heatsink was tight, and it still seemed like the power supply. So, just for kicks, I stuck the original one back in. Problem solved. The new power supply actually is bad, still need to return it, but the real issue was the heatsink.
PC#2 was myself. Since Mary is way more on the cutting edge than me, she always seems to have the cool new toys, her palm pilot is about a year old, mine is ancient, in palm pilot years, her PC was 6 months old or so, mine is ancient in PC years. That’s pretty much the norm, I get the leftovers and that’s ok with me since I’m usually tearing something apart. Well, little miss cutting edge decided a laptop was needed, and actually, it makes alot of sense. Her web business is taking off and there is some travel on the horizon, for her, with her work, so she shopped around and found herself a laptop. If you’re paying attention, you will know where that old, broke down, few month old PC ended up. That’s right, in my grubby little paws. So, over the weekend, I did some clean up, partitioning and other utilitarian things to my new PC and kept noticing that it kept wanting to dial up a connection. That’s never good, especially considering DSL doesn’t require my PC to spontaneously attempt to dialup. So I realized I should follow my own advice and check for spyware, especially since I hadn’t done that in too long. Not surprisingly, I cleaned off some spyware that was trying to dial out.
PC#3 was tonight, a trio of PC’s that I returned to for the second time in recent history. There were many issues, shutting down and locking up being the tip of the iceberg. Spyware was not really a factor, they all 3 had 10-12 non-threatening cookies or something. The culprit tonight was McAfee. Every product that McAfee makes was on these machines and once I determined that when McAfee loaded is when the lockup occured, my question was, ‘Are you that attached to McAfee?’ The answer was ‘No not really’ It was recently purchased as a replacement to Norton, since Norton seemed to be causing problems. I blew McAfee away and along with some other minor cleanup, and came out on top. By the way, I also installed AVGfree and ZoneAlarm firewall.
So the question of the day becomes, has anyone else had issues with McAfee? This is not my first run in with their quirky software. That was one of the first things I zeroed in on tonight when I saw it was loaded, definitely have been there, done that!
That’s all for now. Hey, I just realized, I’m almost cutting edge, which is not nearly as much fun. Cutting edge means ‘under warranty’ and not eligible to be overhauled or overclocked or anything. 18 months and counting until that warranty is out, maybe then I can have some fun but man, this PC sure can fly, so I guess there are some advantages to cutting edge.
NOTE: This post was edited, due to me re-reading what I wrote late last night!
I’ve had problems with McAfee in the past. I dumped them for Norton. I haven’t had any problems with Norton.
On a personal level, I have very much enjoyed Avast from Alwil. I don’t know what it would be like deployed in a corporate setting, but I have been very impressed with this software over the past 3 years.
We use Norton here at the office and our Systems Admin has no problems with it (except back during the XP upgrade for some reason.)
In my defense I had no spyware before donating the ‘puter to the cause.