System restore is a wonderful thing

For the most part, I ignore the system restore utility in XP. I was peripherally aware of it, but never had any call to explore it more fully. When I took over my daughter’s old laptop computer after she got a new one, she was able to restore the system to exactly the way it was when it came from Dell, which was both impressive and mildly dismaying, as it meant that all those programs we dutifully uninstalled because they were demos or promos or whatever weren’t actually gone from the hard drive. They were still sitting there, taking up space.

However, I decided to do a restore to my laptop at a point before I installed the Norton protection suite, which did the trick. I was then able to simply delete the Symantecs directory in the program files (something I couldn’t do previously because some component was always in use, no matter how many processes I killed). Now my laptop is back to its old self, and McAfee its antivirus world. It only took me two days to undo the work of a few minutes.

Next I have to tackle my desktop PC, which has the same issue. I did receive some helpful information from AT&T/Yahoo about why Norton might be making my system sluggish–apparently it’s secretly configured to do a background scan of my hard drive every time I boot up. No wonder it was running like molasses.

I’ve been Kindled. I see that The Road to the Dark Tower is being offered for the new Amazon wireless reader. My Amazon Kindle sales ranking was 6200 this morning.

It looks like The Unit is coming apart. One member is dead, one is on the outs with both his wife and the colonel, and one looks to be losing his nerve (according to the previews for next week). I liked the con game Bob and Jonah played last night, though.

Ever notice this formula with some of the Law and Order shows? The first fifteen minutes are about one thing and the rest of the show is about something else completely? Take SVU last night. The first part concentrated on the extreme fighting and the extreme fighter. Once he was “taken care of,” though, the story went off in a different direction and the events of that first act, and the actions of the father of the victim, seemed to matter very little.

Addendum: I wrote this about my visit to the set of The Mist last April for Cemetery Dance #59, but since that issue won’t be out for a while, we decided to post it as a “free read” at the CD web site. If you’re not familiar with the story of The Mist and plan to see the movie, you should probably skip this until later, as I discuss the fates of several characters. Also included are my interviews with Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden and Toby Jones.