There's a good reason for my absence...

...and a few not so good reasons. They're the usual reasons, they mostly have something to do with books or DVDs. I've just found the best non-fiction book of the year, the best documentary I've seen this year and possibly the best TV show ever and they all have something to do with Atheism. However, this post is about why I've been non communicado for 4 days when I don't have anything to do.

Well, it was because my laptop, my beloved laptop, decided that the feeling isn't mutual and wanted to die.

OK, I overstated that a bit. It didn't decide to commit suicide or anything remotely like that. It did acted up and I felt like strangling it with its power cord. All I did was trying to clean up the hard drive and permanently delete some junk then all of the sudden Norton Internet Security crashed and wouldn't work again. Hence operation "clean up hard drive" turned into operation "get rid of Norton Internet Security".

Now that's not the end of the problem. Since I was without any proper protection from virus and adwares I decided to install a newer version of NIS. Everything went well until NIS interfered with my bittorrent download. No matter how many times I told it to allow all activities it wouldn't do what I told it to and just crashed my laptop almost every time I started a bittorrent download. When it didn't crash the laptop, which was quite rare, the download went at dial-up speed.

So out went NIS and my laptop was alright again, albeit without Antivirus and internet security. The stupid built in firewall in Windows SP2 doesn't provide enough protection so I have to find an alternative to NIS. And I found it. From now on I'm gonna stick with McAfee Internet Security Suite. It's good and it's fast. Plus it works fine with bittorrent. Now I have to get back to operation: clean up laptop hard drive.