So… those updates weren’t the problem. Or at least, not the REAL problem.

A while ago I wrote about my laptop not wanting{.} to connect to the internet or an Exchange Server. Two days later, I thought I found{.} the updates which were the cause of all this. It wasn’t exactly true, but in the end everything worked… Because of that, I let it go for a few days. But after a while, I couldn’t help myself: I had to know the real reason for the problem. So after thinking long and hard about the (configuration) differences between my laptop and my ’normal machine’, I could think of only one which could be big enough to have this kind of impact. My laptop has had (the trial version of) Norton Internet Security installed, and my ’normal machine’ did not.

I tried some installing, uninstalling and re-installing this weekend, and it seems like Internet Security was indeed the troublemaker. Eventually I uninstalled it, restored all updates for my laptop, installed all of them, and there you had it: my laptop was (still) working like a charm and I was a happy camper.

I had a rough start with Norton years ago, back when I occasionally repaired computers in case the technical service department got too busy. I can’t even remember what or why it was, but somehow I ended up with this image of Norton as being software that wanted to do stuff other software was capable of doing, but in a buggier less stable way. I still have that idea, and normally I don’t even install their software. So I’m not quite sure why I missed it was installed on my laptop. Maybe I didn’t want to see it. Or maybe I thought to myself “It must be better by now”. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case…

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