Wednesday, October 28, 2009

My computer broke

Sometimes there is great wisdom in sticking to what you know rather than venturing out and trying something new. Such is the case of what happened to my new laptop that we had bought at the end of July. It had worked just fine until I decided to try a new antivirus program because it was free via the Amazon program I'm a part of. It was called Bitdefender. I had problems with it from the beginning. I'm used to Norton and have used it for 8 years. I've always stuck with it--I shouldn't have changed. Because of the problems with Bitdefender, I thought I would try McAffee when I had the chance to try it for free. Bad, bad choice. In the process, it broke my computer.

It turns out that you have to completely uninstall any antivirus program before you install a new one and there's tricks with Norton and the others that only well trained computer folks know about. Ugh! If you don't completely uninstall them, the new program see the old program often as a virus itself--foreign to the computer and can lock it up. That's what happened to me. My screen went black--it didn't even just lock up. It went black! I will never do that again. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with HP and afterwards I just didn't trust the computer anymore. I am going to stick with Norton, pay for it, and forgo the pain of breaking and returning a computer again!

In the end, free isn't always the best deal! =)

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