A few weeks ago, I asked for some assistance on improving the performance of my computer. Thanks to all of the assistance offered by my readers, the laptop performs much better. I added memory, defragged the hard drive, and eliminated some unnecessary background programs.

When I added memory, most of that had not yet taken place, and the installing tech got a little frustrated with the boot time of my laptop. One of his recommendations was to get rid of Norton Anti-Virus, which has lots of features but throws a lot of processes into the background. He recommended PC-Cillin instead. His store sold both (as well as other brands) but I decided to hold off on making that change, mostly because I still had a few more months on my subscription. However, with all of the down time I'm facing, I figured that this might be the best time for me to play around with it, and I picked up a copy on a rare field trip this afternoon.

So far, it appears to work pretty well. It has all of the same features as Norton, but it initiates significantly fewer processes. My programs launch more quickly, and their commands seem to work faster as well. Of course, the true measure of an anti-virus program is how well it protects you, and I haven't had enough time with this product to know that. So far, I'm pretty pleased.

I've also been testing Internet Explorer 7.0 for the past month. This beta release has the same kind of tabbed browsing that Firefox has. I've still got Firefox as my default web browser, but I use IE7 to manage the website through MT. IE7 has a nice spell checker that allows me to quickly verify that I haven't misspelled anything in a post before finishing it. So far, I like it, although I doubt that I'll stop using Firefox.

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