There is a bit of tension here between myself and the group in charge of computer configuration. This “Desk Top” group has installed virus control, spyware control and automatic snapshot software on every machine. It all tends to go off at the same time and I have seen users who cannot get any work done for hours at a time while an intensive spyware sweep is running or virus check is on.

They have made it so that users cannot install any software at all. In order to get my users to run my software I have to call these guys and have them do it. I don’t have many more rights than the average user, although I can access most of my registry and install software.

Needless to say, one of the first things when I did when I started this job was disable the snapshot software and the spy sweep. I left Norton Antivirus installed. After all, I occasionally install a risky downloaded utility with my fingers crossed and it helps if Norton is there to catch the bad ones. I use Firefox for browsing, with adblock, so I have a generally safer and quicker browsing experience than anyone else here.

The Desk Top group reinstalled the software over night and the next morning I figured out how to keep them out of my machine. They gave up, but grumbled about it in meetings. I let them grumble, after all, I was winning on points. When my machine finally died, I decided that it was better to lose this battle and fight other, more important wars. So, I now have Norton AV, Webroot Spy Sweeper and Altiris all bogging down my machine. The machine is much faster than the one I had 5 years ago with 2 gigs of ram and I don’t really notice.

One thing that really annoys me is the WebRoot Spy is deleting my cookies every morning. I have to re-login to all of my online accounts. The registry is rigged so I can’t alter any of the settings controlling this. I have four or five accounts that I check, and its a pain to go back and lookup the passwords for all of them. It would be nice if gmail, especially, just stayed logged in like it is supposed to do.

This morning I altered the attributes of the Firefox profile directory to “hidden”. I then rebooted and Webroot Spy Sweeper did not find any cookies to delete.

I have won!!!!