Monday, October 24, 2005

Jornada 820 and why my hatred for NAV is growing!

I was around a friend's place yesterday - very nice meal Victoria, thanks! Anyhow - They'd had a Jornada 820 sitting in the cupboard from ages ago and I remembered I had THE ONLY wireless card that had a CE2.11 driver for it - The Lucent WaveLan Silver. I used to have a Jornada back in 1999/2000 and lived with it for more than a year and loved it. It booted in under a second and the battery lasted all day (and the following day as well!). I wish I still had it as folks ported Linux to it. I might start trawling eBay.
So, I loaded up the driver and got the machine working on their wireless network. It really was a capable little sub-laptop - a bit long in the tooth (the version of pocket IE works with very few modern websites) but fast (no hard drive - everything is in memory). Pocket Office still opens current versions of Word and Excel files too.

Norton Internet Security Suite is the worst bit of software ever! Bob had it installed on three of his machines in the hope that all the things it promised (freedom from Spam, Viruses and other nasties) were real. Two of the machines had the LDN Trojan which tries to open up an SMTP route through your internet connection and four minutes after boot it attempts to send out a shed-load of spam. Now the Norton firewall detected that activity but rather than temporarily blocking port 23 and telling you it pops several hundred windows that you can't close quick enough. I ended up having to tug the mains and re-boot. The bundled version of Anti-virus (even after an update) wasn't able to catch the nasty. So - after removing Norton and replacing it with AVG Free (and making sure the Windows firewall was on and working) Bob's comments was "wow this feels like a new computer - applications launch quickly and it feels like there is a 3Ghz processor under the covers!". Norton was letting him down similarly on all three machines! AVG had no problem catching the trojan and killing it.

1 comment:

Rupert said...

Phil

What do you use for Parental Controls?