Today, we had no classes at my university (it’s a sort of holiday) and I stayed home this morning rather than driving in to work.
Anyway, early in the morning I decide I will do some computer stuff and maybe play some COH. I recall that ZoneAlarm has been nagging me for the last week to update it, and I kept putting it off, so I decide since I have time, I’ll go ahead and update. I download the update from the link they provide, and I go ahead and shut down ZA and start the install process. Halfway through, the install tells me that I “Need administrative access” to continue. Now on this older machine, there is only ONE user, and it’s me, and I have full power/admin rights. Yes I know, not secure, but XP is such a pain in the ass about such things that I do it like that. Plus, I am the only person ever able to physically access my machine.
Anyway, I decide this is an odd message but try again… with the same result, along with getting error messages about the “true vector” monitor, which is connected to/part of ZA. So I check around and people recommend doing a clean uninstall/reinstall. I try that… same junk.
After mucking around with this for over an hour, I finally decide it’s easiest to just do a system restore. I’ve got a restore point from last night — great! I’ll just do that. Windows tries… but now it tells me that it can’t restore from that point, try another. I then go back… and back… and back… for over a week, apparently without any restore points being able to succeed.
So… somehow trying to install ZA broke it, then UN-installing ZA broke system restore (apparently) and now I can neither re-install ZA, nor restore the system from backup… so I am without ZoneAlarm. Right now that machine (which is not the one I am using — the one I am using right now is a laptop) only has Windows Firewall on it.
Everything else seems to be working, but once again ZA and Windows are not playing nicely with each other. My subscription to ZA is almost up (late Nov), and I supposedly get up to 2 more computers to protect via the new Trend Micro 1.5 year license I got with this new Dell laptop… so I am probably going to just give up on ZA, install Trend on the old machine, and make a new system restore point so in case I need to restore, I can.
Meanwhile, it’s now after 2 PM, and I have not YET had a chance to do either (a) any work, or (b) any gaming, thanks to both ZA and Microsoft.
Gotta love these people.
