=?Utf-8?B?QWxhU29mdHJpZGVy?= said:
Would you suggest McFee for AV? Am running latest SP2 and all upgrades as
have broadband.
Name almost any product and there will be some people having a tantrum,
claiming that is the source of all evil and certainly what caused your
problem.
You don't think that if everybody who ever bought Norton promptly had
it cripple their computer that the word wouldn't get out? Lots of people
buy and use this and have no problems at all. I've got two different
users here with Norton 2005 having everything turned on and it works
just fine.
And his claim that Microsoft's firewall doesn't use any resources while
other firewalls do is simply silly. Ask him to demonstrate it running
without needing a CPU, that will certainly confirm his claim.
In addition, the Microsoft firewall only handles a small subset of the
things that other firewalls do. One example, infect your computer with
something that is spewing a thousand spam a minute at the world. The
Microsoft supplied firewall will ignore all outgoing virus, spam, probes,
etc. It ONLY checks incoming. So if you have some malicious little
net vandal sending stuff out from your computer the Microsoft stuff
will never let you know.
If you want low software overhead, you might consider either one of
the Linksys routers with built-in limited firewall, once set up that
will block some things and not use up cpu cycles. Or you can get
a second cheap machine and run all the firewall software on it, use
it to protect your machine. Some recommend this for extra security.
Now, back to your original problem. Yes, Windows Explorer, particularly
after SP2 has had hundreds and thousands of people report problems with
it. There has been lots of finger pointing. A tiny number of specific
problems have been identified that do have fixes. But lots of these
seem to have no clear solution.
You might try the free SP2 support provided by Microsoft, since you have
both SP2 and Windows Explorer problem you might get a miracle and they
discover something. But there is no guarantee that this will fix it.
I went round and round with them for months, with a completely reproducible
SP2 Windows Explorer Problem. They had me check a long list of things
and then apparently forget what they had done and had me check them all
over again. Never did get a solution.
My apologies for the stuff they call software now days
(And "stay away from 'beta software', hell WINDOWS is beta software)
