Free at last!

Do I give a crap about what's going on at Harlequin and their new ebook imprint and their new vanity publishing venture? No. Okay, that's out of the way.

I'm free of Norton AntiVirus. FREE! I toughed it out until I got my money's worth out of those thieves at Symantec and then uninstalled the sack of creeping, crawling turdlings that seemed to have invaded every function of my computer. God, what a difference it made in performance!

You can't begin to imagine (or maybe you can, if you've had to deal with Norton AV) how miserable this software made my every waking hour. Each morning when I turned on my desktop, it took at least an hour, a freaking hour, to start running smoothly. Sometimes, it even took an hour and a half.

But wait, there's more! Norton drained my virtual memory on a daily basis, forcing a stall-out as Windows came up with more. Around midday, and then again late in the evening, my PC would start to choke up again -- hung apps, frozen screen, the works. Three or four times a day, I couldn't get anywhere or do anything. And not just for a minute or two, but for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. Norton kept disrupting my Internet browsing; it kept disrupting other installed programs; it even fucked with the simple process of shutting down. It was everywhere, like aliens intent on abduction, doing God-knows-what to the innards of my poor Dell.

How can this be? I still don't know. How can an antivirus program that costs $60 a year be more destructive than the bugs it's supposed to fend off or neutralize? Where does Symantec get its techies from? The lowest 1% of Whatsamattah U's graduating class?

EVERYBODY, STAY AWAY FROM IT!