Snark/rant

[ivor]

I use Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition.  It works pretty good.  I would never use the Home Edition, Bleck!

[Bluenose]

I use Norton 360 and have found it to be very good.  Have not had any of the problems some appear to have had.  Most of the people I have run into that have claimed to have problems with this product actually have configuration problems - usually, bit not exclusively, setting the level of notification too high or the security too tight.  At the end of the day it is a balancing act between security and being able to actually use the computer.

As for AVG I have had to repair (after virus/trojan etc attack) far too many PCs that were allegedly "protected" by this product to ever be comfortable with it.  It just simply does not rate as a first tier product IMO.  I am no fan of McAffee, either, at least since it was bought by CA - that company has way too much track record for ruining perfectly good applications that it has acquired for my liking.  I have worked in shops where it was policy that no CA product would even be considered.

As far as I am concerned, the only three AV products I would consider are Sophos, Symantec (Norton) and Trend Micro.

[Sibling Lambicus the Toluous]

New snark:

As noted in my new heading, my coche is now descompuso.

On Thursday, my car stalled several times... it was low on gas (though I didn't think it was that low), so I took it straight to the gas station.  I put some gas in, turned the key, and... nothing.  Waited for a bit with it on "run" (to let the fuel pump do its thing), still nothing.  I tried a few more times, then finally pushed it away from the pumps over into a parking stall.

Fiddled with things, checked fuses, swapped relays for other relays, and tried again: it started!  I reversed out, put the car in drive, moved 10 feet... and the car quit again, and a relay (I'm fairly certain it was the automatic shutdown relay, based on me feeling each relay under the hood in turn) started buzzing on-and-off and stayed that way for about a minute... and refused to start since.

So... I am now without car.  When I looked up the symptoms in the book, I got everything from minor stuff to "seized engine".

Based on some other weirdness (my interior lights now don't come on when they're on the "turn on when the door opens" setting, but when I they're on the "turn on no matter what" setting, they work), I'm thinking that one of two things is happening:

- my ECU is FUBAR; or,
- my ECU is fine but something else is FUBAR, which the ECU recognizes and because of that, puts everything into auto shutdown mode.

According to the magic book (a.k.a. the factory service manual... as opposed to the Haynes manual, which is "the bloody book"), there are only a limited number of things that will cause an automatic shutdown condition; IIRC, the only things are complete lack of spark, and complete lack of movement on the crankshaft position sensor.

Oh... you don't think it could be a timing belt slipping then breaking, do you?  Think that would explain the stalling?  There was no big awful noise, but I'm not sure if I have non-interference heads or not.  I'll have to check when I get a chance, I suppose, as well as turn the crankshaft with a wrench just to quickly rule out the seized engine possibility.

Bah.  I really don't want to have to get a new car.

[beagle]

If it's got a catalytic converter then it could be a broken lambda sensor, or one detecting petrol in the exhaust (it turns the engine off to save the converter - regardless of whether you're overtaking a truck at the time :-) ).

Some cars (VWs I think amongst others) will shut the engine off if the oil pressure drops too.

[The Meromorph]

By halfway through your post (before you mentioned the magic book) I was suspecting the crankshaft position sensor... (Also the wires from and the connector).
I'd try replacing it...

[beagle]

I use Norton 360 and have found it to be very good.  Have not had any of the problems some appear to have had. 

My problems were mainly with Corporate. Twice in the time I was using it they had major security holes,  and the process to fix it was manual, and involved a lot of fiddling around on their site finding what needed changing.  Fixing it involved taking twenty servers off-line and not putting them back until manually corrected.  After that there was no way I could have got my boss to sign another renewal, even if I'd wanted to.
Home Norton had a couple of similar issues, but more often it was LiveUpdate getting itself jammed and stopping updating till you hunted round for a magic tool to free it. It also did the same trick to me it did to Griffin. Get you to renew for a year, then a few months into it say the whole version was obsolete and must be upgraded.

Had much more success with Trend, but have been warned-off the latest version by people who said it had gone backwards in speed and efficiency.

Sophos was good when I last used it, but you paid quite a premium for access to real support people who knew what they were doing.


P.S.  Sibling Lambicus

If the relay is a red herring and it turns out not to be the crankshaft sensor after all it could always be the fuel pump. Not sure how you check them these days when there can be very high pressure on some parts of the the inlet side of GDI/FSI engines.
I got similar stalling + inexplicably working again for a while once cooled down when one went (an old mechanically driven type) on one of my cars years ago.

[Sibling Chatty]

Snarking about Dr. Robert Hall of Temple Texas.

If you would all appeal to you favorite deities/karmas/whatever, and have this jerk stricken miserable.

[The Meromorph]

Aaah! Him no goan sleep good no moah!  Him no piss straight no moah! Him get de itchies on de ickies, dam sure!

So say de t'ing wi' de t'ree bomps. Cost me six chicken anna good knife, dat!

[Griffin NoName]

Chatty, that's a very reserved rant compared to the evil done. Which tells its own story.

Back on my itchy rant, Norton, it's Liveupdate problems that underlie all the bugs I've had, and Liveupdate not finishing probably the main reason too. It's easy to spot the damage in windows admin logs etc. If I wasn't so fed up, it would be quite amusing, given the nature of the reason one installs this software in the first place.

[ivor]

Griff, take your computer to the window, make sure there's no one below and drop-kick it out.  Go to the store and get a new one.  That's your best bet I think.   

Aren't you still running Windows 2000 or something?

[Griffin NoName]

Win 2K is my modern machine. I'm still running 98 SE on my main desktop  But most friends and relatives machines are even older, much much older. It may be the awful social circles I mix in of course. Or alternatively we are not quite the consumer society we think we are. There is a sort of pay off in that everyone relies on me to sort out their PC problems and I wouldn't be able to if I was up to date and didn't have any problems myself. 

It all started when I thought I'd wait for Longhorn...... I'm still gambling on them bringing out an upgraded bug-fixed viable Vista 2012 that simulates multi-core without me needing to buy new kit

Never do a college course without getting your kit upgraded first.

[ivor]

Good luck!  You want me to send you a Knoppix CD? 

[Griffin NoName]

That'd be great; I need something to rest my coffee mug on while I get shot of the remaining course work. But perhaps it might be better if you sent one of these handy toolkits to Sibling Chatty so she can, as they claim, troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve problems as they arise instead of relying on the medics. 

[ivor]

You want me to send one of those USB drives with Knoppix *sub your favorite pint sized usb distro here* ?  What do I get?    It'd be better than any version of Vista *dark os from the nether regions* .

[Sibling Lambicus the Toluous]

Thanks for the advice, everyone.  I guess it's time to spend some quality time wrenching on my car.

beagle, I did notice that when I sat there trying to let the fuel pump run, I couldn't hear it... but the area was a bit noisy and I've never really been able to hear it anyhow.  I think I may try replacing the fuel filter at the very least, since if it's clogged completely, that could look like a failed fuel pump (plus, it may be due for changing anyhow... I haven't had this car that long, so I don't know when it was changed last).

Thanks, all.

My car may still be discombobulated, but I'm slightly less so now.