Giving up an old friend of sorts

A couple posts ago I relayed my adventures installing Norton AV 2007 and Ghost 10.0. Ever since my computer has slowed down markedly and further more I discovered the Ghost Recovery Disk won't boot on my machine. After doing some forum searches it turns out the Nvidia video drivers on the Norton disk not compatible with a lot of older cards, evidently mine included.

Last year I looked at the ZoneAlarm Security Suite, but passed it by after seeing on the ZA support forum the legions of folks who couldn't get it to run properly. I took another look and discovered things greatly improved. I noted they also offer a simpler product, ZA w/ AV for a very reasonable $20, with the option to try it out for a 15 day free trial. I ended up buying the ZA w/ AV which now uses the Kaspersky AV engine, CNET's current editors choice for AV software. More than the $0.01 I paid for the Norton combo, but my computer usable again. At work they use NOD32 which also gets great reviews, but I didn't pick up on this until after I'd bought the ZA package. We'll see how it goes and I can always give NOD32 a try if things don't work out as hoped.

For my backup software I'm giving Acronis True Image Home 10.0 a try. It seemed to work well during the 15 day free trial, so I bought a copy from Newegg today. We'll see how it works in the long run.

I'm thinking I need to give more thought to replacing my 4 year old laptop. It a top of the line Toshiba multi-media machine in it's day, but it seems the 1.7GHZ Pentium M starting to show it's age. I upgraded to 1GB of RAM a year ago, which helped, but it seems most modern software designed assuming more under the hood than my machine has to offer.