Next to the dismantling of the Bill of Rights, my growing problems with Windows 2000 aren’t a very big deal. But the OS has been getting progressively less stable in the past few weeks. Today it has come to a grinding halt on my ThinkPad.
Problems galore. A component of Zone Alarm, the firewall on which I rely, is eating up 99 percent of the CPU for reasons I can’t understand. Something is preventing Norton Antivirus from running in autoprotect mode. And when I start my VPN client software, it shows up in the Task Manager as a running process, but I can’t see it on the desktop or even shut it down. Naturally, the Zone Alarm process refuses to shut down, too.
After hours of doing things like repeatedly booting into safe mode, uninstalling and reinstalling applications and otherwise making my hair even more gray, I finally get the system back working, sort of. As soon as I can, I’m going to reinstall Windows and my applications, thereby chewing up a day unnecessarily in service of an industry that can’t be bothered to get its act together. This has wrecked my schedule, but hey, who am I to complain?