A few minutes after I got home our son James asked me to look at his computer, saying he was having trouble connecting to the ‘Net and that his Norton Antivirus subscription had expired. Sure enough, his computer could not even ping our local LAN, let alone the wider internet.

This looked like a depressing situation, since a couple times before James has thoroughly trashed this laptop, forcing me to reinstall Windows and rebuilt the system completely, or as mdlbear says “nuke and pave”. Not how I wanted to start the holiday weekend.

However, before considering that I rebooted the system–always worth a try with Windows. And in fact that was all it needed–it immediately found our LAN and from there could see the world. I updated his antivirus, which Symantec makes quite easy once they have your credit card info.

Since I had his computer in my hands I took the opporunity to run a full antivirus scan with the updated software, then scanned for spyware with Spybot and LavaSoft’s Ad-Aware. There were no viruses and very little spyware. I deleted all of the latter with no trouble.

James had obviously been taking good care of the machine, using Norton and the other programs. I suppose he could have been a little more proactive with today’s problems, but he was no worse than a lot of people I see at work. I was quite happy with this, and told him so.