The rebuilding
Yesterday was an interesting day at work. My boss evicted me around 1pm. Actually ordered me out of the office and told me to take some days off. Wow… so today was my first full day off from work since the sunday on labor day weekend. 
It was a good day: Got to run the littlest son to a birthday party, accompanied the wife to the grocery store, watched our middle son test for his red belt and watched the oldest daughter’s soccer game. All things I haven’t done for quite a while. 
Ok, back to the eviction yesterday: Now, I couldn’t just come home and lay around (yesterday), could I? Oh heck no, I had an ailing computer to tend to! I never did figure out exactly what happened to it, but “Safe Mode with Networking” worked, so I didn’t spend much time futzing with it. Frankly, it was over due for a reload anyways. So, I spent the afternoon backing up key stuff, then fdisked and formatted ALL disks. Yep, some drives hadn’t been touched for over 5 years… Lots of cruft gone! Of course, I couldn’t dump it all, but I got rid of a lot of stuff I hadn’t touched in years. Still have my old WildCat BBS (dos!) floppy images though
Got a fresh (legal!) copy of XP Pro installed and patched. Installed Outlook 2003 (with the SpamBayes plugin too) and some other essentials (hello WoW!). Decided this would be a good time to try Open Office.org 2.0, so grabbed that instead of my tired old copy of MS Office. I gotta say, it just keeps getting smoother and better. I’m quite pleased. The new Base application bundled in looks pretty slick. I pointed it at an ODBC connection to my Blog DB and it had no problems linking tables. This might finally be a decent open source answer to MS Access for quick and dirty db table viewing/editing!
On a very radical departure for me, I decided to give McAfee AV a shot. Why? Well… ’cause it was free. :$ Got an email a few weeks back from Comcast about it, so decided to give it a shot. It seems to have a bit of anti-spyware built in, so what the heck — I’ll try it. I was more curious about the system load that it might have (which seems to be pretty nil so far). As long as it does it’s job, I’ll be happy.
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I should clarify the McAfee AV being free. not free because of illegal methods! Free because my cable company is giving away the McAfee products to customers.
Possibly Related posts:
- More wi-fi fun — change those default SSIDs!
- Active Virus Shield Rode Off into the Sunset
- Helpful Antivirus programs
- Avast there, you lubbers!
- Odd Bedfellows in the Anti-Spyware Biz
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