Epstein dead in his cell

You may remember when McAffee antivirus was the best out there, and was shareware. $25 I think. He got smart and went the formal route and made a buncha money.
So, he's not crazy, he's eccentric.

That was quite some time back - my sister knew a computer "guru" who advised using it over Norton / Symantec products ( which I was familiar with and used ). I never liked their stuff, though, and bought Norton 2000 version when I needed it to fix Victoria's (sister) computer - she had been "inflicted" with Windows ME on her latest "update" which had so many conflicts with her legacy printer, webcam, etc. that I seriously considered and offered to "downgrade" her system back to 98 just to avoid all the hassles. She liked ME for some reason - once we got all the 'bugs' out - and used it for a year or so until she got a laptop which had, as I recall, 2000 server installed. *That* OS I still use on my ancient 'backup' system at home which is _not_ connected to the 'Net at all - just transfer stuff I need to from _this_ computer via USB 'stick'.

Anyway, McAfee _is_ a "smart cookie" - not sure if he's eccentric, though! :^)

Rick " paranoia is nature's way of keeping us alive... " Jones

I really do have enemies

McAfee was best by testing in those days. Peter Norton was the MSDOS guru then. His program found out what ailed you and fixed it. Later he joined Symantec and they began writing antivirus and security s/w.
Don't know where he is now, but Symantec has fallen on hard times. Their Norton stuff turned into one of the successful suites for corporate security, so they just sold it for bailout money. All that's left is the consumer arm which is mainly Lifelock/Norton.

I have 98 with all the latest on my wife's ex-laptop with some legacy stuff. When either goes, that's done.
My desktop has Win 7 Pro. I'll update it until next year and then take my chances.
With ME, the first thing to do was shoot Bob.
My new background, on the 19" HP monitor, is Hubble's most recent Jupiter picture. Very nice.

My reference is to an old joke. Regular people are crazy. Rich people [same behaviors] are eccentric.

in fact, I used it here not too long ago. I thought you were in that thread, but could be mistaken.

Anyway, my fave thing I "loved to hate" was not Bob, but "Clippy" the paper clip thingy - or was that called Bob, also? The reason I like 2000 is it's so stable - annnd you can still open a DOS window inside it. My ( v. old! ) fave software runs best in plain old DOS 6.1 - and I still have a fondness for the simplicity of using that OS.

Rick " 'No one will ever need more than 640K' " Jones :^)

and he raved about 2000. Said it was closest to Win server and other high end stuff. Stability.

crazy.

win the lottery ( I don't play, so that's umm, hypothetical), we or one of us would 'graduate' to eccentric. Come to think of it, I'm sort of shaped like a cam ( in the midsection ) so I'm *already* there! { plus I'm "certifiable" as they used to say in da movies, so... twice as qualified, "naturally", eh? } > insert lop-sided smiley here < or :^\ < does that work?

Rick " barks at the moon, or rather snarls like a cat 'person' should " Jones

here at CNET for years and later a Moderator, I always advised against McAfee and Norton products because they were even more invasive than Windows had been (Windows is so bloated now that it's disgusting but I love their product and continue to use it). I used Avast for many years and supplemented it with a few smaller free programs and had no (knock on wood) viruses etc and am still free of those issues. But I'm also very careful to never click on links in my emails, even from friends or family since I don't know what THEY do/use for protection and am watchful even of links provided in posts.

I liked/like Norton Utilities though - back in the day I used it at home and my employer's IT guy used it on our LAN, too.

I currently use Avast also and find it faster and 'leaner' than the other free offerings. I guess we both hail from the 'era' or whatever where tight code was admired and sought after - sometimes amazes me how much memory prices have changed - still recall spending a huge amount to "max out" my old 486 to 16MB - and now I can get a USB stick with that for the price of a fast-food meal!
And hard disks? fuggetaboutit! If you had told me thirty years ago that in the future we would have Terabyte-size drives in PCs I'd have thought you were nuts.

Anyway, have you found a "home" for your corner-desk ? I assume all the paint is dry, and you are on the next project(s). Victoria and I are going to strip down her "hope chest" to bare wood (it's a thrift-store 'find' and appears home-made and is rather neat but the stain plus varnish original finish is aging poorly!). That will happen in the fall when the heat is less - the fumes from Jasco stripper are bad enough when it's cool... :^)

Rick " basically a week's wages for sixteen million bytes, but I just _had_ to do it " Jones

was the most pirated program. Def: Having it w/o having paid.
Happened because you call a tech, he brings his legal Norton, fixes you up, leaves without bothering to uninstall.

One problem. It dug so deeply that sometimes a DOS version of it would wipe out a PC using the next version. Better to pay for the upgrade.

A few years ago they were rating highly in computer mags I trust. Never had a problem.
I like their suite also.
As I noted, Norton and McAfee used to be higher than now. Happens.

at least no wife and no known children is what I heard.