Hopeful improvement on the computer front - RonO's Ramblings — LiveJournal

Yesterday and today I took several pieces of action, which I hope will improve my computer situation at least until the budget is ready for a replacement.

1: I uninstantiated Norton 360 and replaced it with AntiVir. While Norton used to be a pretty good product, the last few generations have increasingly become bloated, and watching my task manager yesterday I noticed that it was using more time than any of my other applications -- to the extent that when the only other things I was running were iTunes and Windows Remote Desktop and both were having to wait for Norton's "background" applications.

I'll also note that on AntiVir's initial scan it turned up about 30 files, all Trojans not viruses, that Norton had missed.

2: I upgraded my RAM from 512MB to 2GB, greatly reducing, I hope, the need to waste time swapping memory.

3: After discovering that my iPod wouldn't sync yesterday, I realized that my firewire card was probably bad. So I got a cable to connect my external DVD Writer by USB instead of firewire (I also moved my iPod over to its USB cable) and at least it is being recognized so far.

At Fry's getting the memory and USB cable, I did confirm that they have at least one kind of IDE CD/DVD Writer so if needed I can replace one or both of my internal optical drives and get a bit of an upgrade as well. But I held off since the new cable was much less expensive.

Now I just completed these, and haven't tried to put it through its paces to see if it has really improved or not, but at the moment I'm optimistic.

On the other hand, while at Costco for facial tissue I did post something to Facebook I should be sorry for, but am not.