Strike Two!

My MS Surface 3 arrived in some way cool packaging -- who knew MS was becoming so hip.... or at least sooooo.... Apple-esque. At any rate, I unveiled my new interweb portal device and powered up.

After my recent experience with the invasion of the schizo-Office, I knew the very first thing I had to do once I connected to my wifi network would be get Norton up and running. I used a friend's machine to log into Norton, check out the stats on my current contract, poke around and find out exactly the steps I needed to take to get downloaded and activated.

Then, in true geek fashion, I wrote a procedure... it wasn't an actual procedure document -- don't go crazy -- simply a list similar to Norton's instructions edited to contain my specific additional steps and info. (I didn't want a Lenny-repeat!)

I signed on with Surface, connected with my wifi (which I don't really trust, I think it's been hanging out on some street corners with Russian and Nigerian hackers) went straight to Norton, logged in, downloaded, applied, and voila! Protected. I ran a full system scan... double and triple checked that I'm protected.... And then  logged off for the night.

The next time I logged in I started getting little Norton Messages slipping onto the lower right corner -- "Your converage is expired! You are not protected!"... and little MS messages zipping in there -- "You are not protected".... Oh no... what now!

So I logged on with my friend's machine again, and verified that I have contract time left.

Then I went online with Surface and signed in to Norton.... After some poking and prodding, it turns out that MS had already installed a "free 30-day subscription" for Norton on Surface, and my recent download seemed to be competing. I felt my best move was to totally un-install all Nortonware from my machine. Then redownload and reinstall my own contract.

Working from an edited procedure (above) I accomplished the uninstall quickly and easily. But when I tried to go online to Norton, I couldn't get IE to come up.... some not-enough-memory message.

I logged off and powered down several times, with the same result. So I opened Task Manager and found that there were two processes eating up 99+%.

I stared at these two processes. The names really didn't mean anything to me... they didn't jump out as something really inherent to a good user experience. So, I killed one of them.

And my desktop died.

Strike Two!