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Sony Vaio Cursor Jumps

I should have trusted my instincts. I have always been suspicious of Sony products’ quality-to-pricepoint ratio, but I purchased a Sony Vaio VGN-FE880E notebook, anyway, when my old Dell’s case broke, in a fit of desperation and comparison shopping. Almost immediately, I discovered that the cursor would sometimes jump around randomly, causing unexpected deletions or insertions of text into the wrong part of a document, or even in other windows.

It seems I am not alone: Google search: Vaio cursor jumps.

What a pain. I just hope it holds up long enough to see me through graduation and starting work.

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I Kill Spammers: Crazyremedy (VPXL) Spammers Want To Kill You

This guy is awesome, even if he has too much time on his hands. I Kill Spammers: Crazyremedy (VPXL) Spammers Want To Kill You.

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ESET Smart Security + Windows Vista = BSOD

On a friend’s advice, I downloaded and installed ESET Smart Security to replace Norton Internet Security 2006, which had been giving me fits (slow, bloated memory use, etc.). It looked fantastic, right up until the first time I tried to bring the computer out of standby mode. I got a blue screen of death (BSOD). Again. And again. And again.

The only way I could get my computer to boot ended up being using msconfig to start in selective startup mode, manually enabling and starting the Windows Installer service, uninstalling ESET ESS, rebooting (being careful to disable those ESET services and programs still listed and checked in msconfig), reenabling normal startup in msconfig, and rebooting again.

Because ESET gets such great reviews, I even tried reinstalling, but with the same result (and complicated, time-consuming uninstall procedure).

After all of that, what I ended up with was a computer with no antivirus software, not to mention more stress.

The ultimate solution? A free copy of McAfee Antivirus from the Law School.