MSN Spaces and Why Is Rebooting Such A Pain?

I'm going to officially stop posting on MSN Spaces. It's a pain. I like that it offers more features than Blogger, but blogger is highly reliable. With MSN Spaces, it seems that the longer you spend creating a thoughtful and useful blog entry, the higher chance that the blog will not be available when you hit the submit button. Because I have no idea if anyone even reads my blog (I can't get my wife to) I don't want to go to that much effort only to find that my message didn't post because "this space is unavailable". Normally a back button will fix it, but that's just getting to be too much work. I'll come back here for my productivity and technology thoughts.

I got a new laptop for Christmas. Wow, it's amazing. It's a Compaq V2414NR. I like it. I'd like better battery life, but hey, we can't have everything. It came with a 3 month trial of Norton Antivirus and Internet Security. I didn't have good luck the last time I used either. I had the 2002 version. They'd run fine for a few weeks, then tell me that they crashed and had to be reinstalled. That got to be too much of a hassle. I've also found that Norton products really bog down my system a lot, although this laptop seems to have enough juice that I don't notice.

This morning, I checked email and Norton told me that it wanted to run Live Update. OK, it asked me if I wanted to. I clicked "OK". The next few minutes got really frustrating. The Live Update window kept flashing. I would click on it, bring it to the surface, then go back to the window I was working in. It would start flashing again, requiring me to repeat this process all over again. I work with my taskbar minimized, so every time a window wants attention, it brings the taskbar up and covers up the bottom of the screen. It always seems to find a way to do this when I need to work near the bottom of the screen, so I can't exactly ignore it. This got really frustrating. Then it wanted the infamous reboot. I can't understand why, whenever I reboot my computer, the same applications decide to lock up each and every time. I have "ccApp", which I found was Norton, "CiceroUIWndFrame", which is part of the Microsoft Office speech recognition (does anyone actually use it?), and one more that I can't think of right now. Sometimes, Microsoft ActiveSuck likes to lock up too. Why do the same applications never shut down each and every time we reboot our computers?

I'd also like to comment that I hate the Caps Lock key. If I now have a feature to disable the touchpad on my laptop, can't someone come out with a feature to disable Caps Lock? I don't use AOL or anything, so I really don't use it...