McAfee Woes

The day before yesterday my Windows XP installation got into a state in which it was unable to start up.  It would get half way through startup and then reboot. 

Now the same thing had happened a few weeks ago and then I had somehow managed to fix it by starting Windows in safe mode, restoring the system configuration of a few days previously and reinstalling a USB driver and Mcafee Internet Security Suite.  At that time I could not tell which of these changes had fixed the problem, I was just glad it was fixed. 

When it occurred the second time, I did a system restore to a few days before but that didn't fix it.  Then I uninstalled McAffee and it went away!  After several hours of fiddling I discovered that it was McAfee Personal Firewall Plus that was causing the problem.  If that was installed the startups failed, if it was uninstalled they succeeded.  I started poking around in Windows XP error reporting and eventually found an option that switched on or off the automatic reboot on a system crash.  Disabling this showed that the error that was occuring during startup was a STOP 0x0000000A IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, whatever that is.  I went to McAfee technical support, downloaded their Virtual Technician and ran it.  It reported several problems with my McAfee installation but could only fix a few of them.  However, I suspect that most of these problems were because Windows was running in safe mode.

By now it was past midnight and I had had enough of McAfee.  I have previously complained about how awkward it was to install on a multiuser PC.  Over the past few months I have been using a PC at work that has Norton Internet Security installed and it seemed much less awkward to use.  My subscription to McAfee only had another month or so to run.  Yesterday morning I walked down to Staples and bought a copy of Norton.  It installed without any problems and  is now running smoothly and unobtrusively.

A Long Forgotten Memory

One of the more unsettling aspects of getting older is that you occasionally come across things in your mind which have not surfaced in decades.  In an instant you are transported back to an embyonic version of yourself and the world you then lived in, without any of the softening that comes with repeated remembering.  This happened to me just after New Year in 1990 as I was driving back down from my parent's house in the north of England.  I had the radio on and Jimmy Saville was playing hits from the 1960's.  As I was passing Milton Keynes he played a children's record from 1963 about a train, probably "The Little Engine that Could".  It immediately  took me back to my pre-school world, the living room of our council house, me playing on a maroon sleeping bag laid out on the floor while my mother was ironing clothes, the atmosphere warm and steamy.  I remember my younger self being excited by and caught up with the song, but I am fairly sure that only a year or so later I would have dismissed it as babyish and felt embarrassed at having liked it.  The fact that I did not recall any such feelings of embarrassment suggests to me that I can neither have heard nor recalled the song at all in the years between 1963 and 1990.

A Compliment

A few years ago, my youngest sister told me how, when she was a child, she thought that when you got to past the age of 20 you had to become serious and act 'grown up'.  But then, she said, she saw what happened to me and was relieved to see that you didn't.  I took this as a compliment.

School Science -1 BBC Science - 0

Over at Bad Science, Ben Goldacre has done a wonderfully efficient demolition job of the recent BBC Panorama program on Wi-Fi.  From it comes this revelation:

Three weeks ago I received my favourite email of all time, from a science teacher. “I’ve just had to ask a BBC Panorama film crew not to film in my school or in my class because of the bad science they were trying to carry out,” it began, describing in perfect detail the Panorama which aired this week.

The Panorama crew were booted out of a school for their shoddy science!  Read the rest of the post for details.  Maybe the BBC should take on a few secondary school science teachers as consultants?

However, the root of the problem appears to be that journalists are not so much concerned with getting at the truth as with producing stories, and this should be borne in mind when assessing their output (and when deciding to renew your TV license).

Deer at Ascot

On Wednesday afternoon there was a deer walking alongside the track as my train came into Ascot station.  On Google Maps its location was here.