intermittent chatter

I bought my laptop on 20th May 2006. Deep (the self-proclaimed sony man ) recommended me Sony VAIO SZ series. I inquired at various places on Lamington Road and also harassed Kunal (IT Concepts) a lot for laptop options. Finally I bought Sony VAIO SZ18GP for 125,000/- with 3 years warranty and carry bag through IT Concepts. With just 1.7 kg weight and 6 hours of actual battery life, I am really glad I bought it.

Norton Antivirus (NAV) came pre-installed with 3 months’ validity. 3 months went smoothly. So I paid for 1 more year. But hell! NAV is more of hype! Slowly it started giving me trouble and one fine day it itself got infected with some virus. It used to get shut down within 5 minutes of stating my laptop with some error message. See the irony! It is supposed to protect my data and it can’t protect itself!

Since I had paid for it, I made use of Symantec Technical Support. I was told on Live Chat that being a licensed user, I was entitled to the new version. I downloaded the uninstaller and the installation files of new version. The new version was better that it could at least protect itself, but slowed down my system even further.

I have had enough! But didn’t want to waste money so tolerated it for a few more months and waited for the license to get over. In the mean time I did my research and narrowed down to two options - NOD32 and Kaspersky. I read various reviews on web and in magazines. Both had equal rating in terms of known virus detection and heuristic scan detection. But what went against NOD32 was it’s overly technical interface and slower (as compared with Kaspersky) release of updates. Of course, there were other free options like Avast and AVG. But I wasn’t convinced about their effectiveness and capability. Reviews also were not too positive.

Just 2-3 days before my NAV license expired, I paid for 2 years’ license of Kaspersky Antivirus (KAV). Since I was switching to KAV from the licensed version of another antivirus, I got some discount as well. KAV is pretty cool. It doesn’t slow down the system as much as NAV. At that time I didn’t buy Kaspersky Internet Security (KIS, not kiss ) because I had ZoneAlarm firewall installed on my syetem and it works good enough.

Recently a new version of ZoneAlarm was released and I got greedy. As Shahrukh Khan says with so much conviction in adverts “Don’t be santusht! Thoda aur wish karo!” (Yeah right! I will rant about that ad some time later.)

I got hold of the installation file and tried to do a clean install (recommended over an upgrade) but it failed horribly! It kept giving me error about TrueVector service. I uninstalled it from Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs but same problem continued. Then I disabled TrueVector (Start > Run > services.msc). Now at least the installation started but it stopped responding at 25% while copying a file called zaquarantine.dll. I tried once again, but it failed. After a little search at Google and ZoneAlarm (ZoneLabs) forums I found out that I was not alone in facing this issue and there was no solution available even at ZoneAlarm forums!

In all these attempts at securing my laptop with good and updated softwares, I also inquired with Kaspersky if they will give me an update from KAV to KIS. I was willing to pay more for the upgrade. But Kaspersky doesn’t have an upgrade option! How surprising! Kaspersky sales told me that ” …. These are different products. The only way to do it is to purchase the needed product. …” I asked if I can get some rebate on my licensed KAV. But even that wasn’t available! How silly! Do they want me to pay twice for the same product?! And there is nothing like Kaspersky Firewall which I could have purchased separately. Thank God! Or I would have spent on that. We (or may be only I) get pretty paranoid when it comes to security of data.

I once again decided to try to install ZA. I once again followed Complete ZoneAlarm Uninstallation Procedure. Still no luck. ZoneAlarm installation kept getting stuck at 25% while copying zaquarantine.dll file. This continued and I was without a firewall on a broadband for 3 days! I even installed Jetico Personal Firewall in the interim but uninstalled it within an hour! Just for record, I didn’t even bother to enable Windows (so called) Firewall.

So many restarts, installation and uninstallation cycles later I decided it to give it one more try and boom! It went thru. This time I had done only one thing differently i.e. started Windows XP SP2 in safe mode. It is pretty unusual that ZoneAlarm needs to be installed in safe mode. But that is how it is!

After all these hiccups in installation, now it is running with great aplomb as usual and my data is safe once again; or at least I believe it is safe! A combination of these two softwares - Kaspersky Anti Virus and ZoneAlarm Firewall has given me peace of mind. I am relieved that now no malicious software can give me a piece of it’s own mind.