I’ve been a Symantec Norton Internet Security/Anti-Virus Customer since 2002. I’ve used NAV as well as NIS for years and have liked the product(s), though they have had their challenges over the years. What I can say about them is that I haven’t gotten a virus yet; and when infections did come via e-mail, NAV/NIS stripped them out of any incoming messages or traffic. Thankfully, I’ve had a relatively clean home network.

Recently, I saw an article on ComputerWorld by Lisa Vaas, that spoke to the new beta of NIS 2009. I decided to download the software, install it, and see how things went. I was even fortunate enough to trade some mail with Lisa on how the software worked for her, how she liked it, etc.

I’ve got a write up on my experience coming, and its been a doosie! This has been going on for the last 2 weeks or so, and as many of you know, I’ve had to rebuild my PC 3 times over that time, partially due to hard drive trouble/replacement, partially due to, well…I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t mean to tease (ok, yeah… I do) ;)  but this one is going to take a bit more to finish up than I was planning.

Stay tuned. I should having things finished up in the next few days. The results may surprise you!

If you remember, a week or so ago, I posted a huge rant on how Microsoft released buggy and problematic SP’s in both Vista SP1 and XP SP3.  In that post, I promisd to post an update when the Symantec Registry Cleaner was released.  Well, it has been released, and it does in fact, work.

I ran it on 2 of the 3 PC’s in my house that have been upgraded to SP3. It removed almost 5000 bad registry keys on my Gateway 700GR desktop, 0 on my daughter’s Dell Latitude C610; and I have yet to run it on my older Sony Digital Studio PC (don’t ever buy one of these… ICK!)

Anyway; the free registry cleaner can be found here.  The installation and execution instructions are pretty simple and easy to follow, so everyone should be ok in running it. If you have XP SP3 installed, I would download it, run it, and see if there are bad keys in your registry REGARDLESS if you’re experiencing problems or not.