Avast! Thanks for Not Letting Me Use Your Software...

Realizing I haven't scanned for malware in way too long, I set out to update the seven malware programs on my system. Yes, I know they all complain about each other but they can just suck it up since no one of them is good enough to be The One.


Updating from within Avast! proved impossible (remnants of two versions back!, connection kept unconnecting and and killing unresumable loooong downloads!). So I uninstalled the program. Ahhh, cathartic deleting! Except a certain component refused to be deleted no matter what, not even in Safe Mode or with Avast!'s deletion tool. Yes, they actually made a separate program to delete their stuff... and it still didn't work.

I then downloaded the 160 MB plus newest version of , scanned with the other six scanners, and installed it. Opened it to tweak the settings and, among other things, checked the option to not allow malware to close the program, closed the program. I hate a slow startup full of programs I don't want running all the time so I opened up msconfig to remove the program from starting up automatically. I then opened up services.msc to change the Avast services from Automatic to Disabled. This is how I usually leave things so that once in a blue moon I can go into Services, set it to Manual and run the program once before Disabling in again.

All my settings set, I restart, go to Services to set Avast! to Manual so I can update to the latest malware definitions and run the program once. Denied! The option in Avast! I turned on to keep malware from closing the program now isn;t allowing me to turn the program on. What a conundrum! What maroons! I uninstalled the program once more and deleted the whole mess. Except, of course, for that one last component that refuses to get off my system. Thanks a lot Avast! And no thanks anymore.

I'm a Windows Curmudgeon

I stuck to Windows 3.1 forever. Then Win95, and now XP. I  really don't want to move on, not to Windows 7 and definitely not to the upcoming 8 (where they can track everything about you but your very thoughts, wear a foil hat just in case). What I really want is a Mac; but can't afford it, of course.

But when the Internet tax beast rose up in PA, I had to make one last Amazon.com purchase before it hit. Which is why I bought this lovely thing : ASUS N56VM-AB71 Full-HD 15.6-Inch 1080P LED Laptop.

I figured it might be time to move on to something past XP. I was wrong.

On XP, I press the Windows Key. Then press F. That opens Firefox. So quick and simple for anyone with even moderate hunt and peck typing skills.
On Win 7, I press the Windows Key. The press F. The accursed "convenient" search box gives me a list of stuff. I have to press arrow keys a bunch of times to maybe get the the option I want; I say maybe because sometimes the arrow selection is stuck who knows where. Or I have to scroll the trackpad over from across the infinite expanse of my screen to fiddle around the list and just when I've got the pointer positioned and am ready to click, bam!, the pointer slipped, and I clicked the wrong thing! I could pin Firefox to the Start menu in that nasty white box on the left but that too requires some strange voodoo involving lots of arrow keys and/or slipping mouse pointers.

On XP, everything was fairly fast.
On Win 7, everything takes forever with a lot of thrashing to load. This is on a system that's 20x more powerful than my XP rig!

On XP, fewer warning when I try to delete crap.
On Win 7, TrustedInstaller won't let me delete the hideous sample music, and videos, and pictures, and wallpapers, and Multilingual User Interface (MUI) files for languages I'll never use (I speak, read, and write only US English, please uninstall the rest so it doesn't take up my entire drive and resources, thank you). Yeah, I did find the fix. But no one should have to go through all that. Why bother deleting the crap since the hard drive has plenty of space, you ask? Because every time you do a disk defrag, or search or malware scan, your system will have to go through the 1000s of extra files. Because that's so many more files to be infected/impersonated by malware. Because I love to delete! (Oh, did I say that last one out loud?)

On XP, the search was fast.
ON Win 7, the "better" search is agonizingly slow AND can't find what I know is there. How is this improved search?

And I've only been at this a few weeks! More crap to come, I sure!