Quote Originally Posted by Matin View Post
so that makes me curious, what mystical level of authority is there above admin? must i invoke a greater computer being?
Yes. His name is Steve Jobs.

But seriously, get rid of Norton as soo as you can, it tends not to be worth the system drain. AVG is a pretty low-profile, and very effective anti-virus. AdAware coupled with Spybot S&S works pretty good on XP machines, but tend to get along like a house on fire if you're running Vista. So use MalwareBytes instead. For a firewall, DO NOT use the windows firewall, under any circumstances. It's either too protective to be useful or leaks like a sieve. I use Zonealarm by CheckPoint, which is a snap to set up and only takes a little while for it to "learn" how to behave. If you want more security, get Comodo firewall. Another helpful little program which takes virtually no system resources is Winpatrol by Billip studios. It's a teensey little program, available in both free and non-free versions with the non-free version having a few more features. It sits and monitors you system for significant changes like new startup programs added, changes to your browser's host file, change of home page, and so on, and so forth. It can also be a very help aid for locating those programs with weird names like "wmiprvse.exe" and it'll usually have a quick description of what the program is and what it does. It'll also help a lot for getting rid of stuff by deleting files on startup before any program gets into place to restore said files. I have not as yet extensively tested it on a vista machine, but it's wonderful for XP machines and takes almost no system resources!