I have a lovely custom desktop at my house. I built it. So I really chose carefully what goes in it. It has two gigabyte of memory and a 250 gigabyte hard drive.
I have a teenaged son. He likes to look at p*rn. Animated p*rn, to be precise. I found this out because he likes to look at it on my computer. This bothers me because this is not the p*rn that I remember my brother and my guy friends looking at. Evidently, tasteful p*rn is more expensive than really tacky p*rn produced by drunken amateurs. I was of course, horrified. What mother wouldn't be? Especially since, and this is important, it is on my computer. In my cache. Popping up when I am trying to do other things. So I bought Cybersitter. I did my research. It claimed to block sites that I wanted to block and allow sites that I wanted to allow. And sure 'nuff; it did. For months.
Then it started malfunctioning. Someone, somewhere, forgotten to share with me an important truth: Norton 360 and parental control software cannot exist on the same computer at the same time. If an unsuspecting person tries to force them to, one of them explodes. I have had this experience before, with daughters instead of software, and a single bedroom instead of a computer. A similar result ensued, though, and we moved into a house with an extra bedroom.
So I try to uninstall Cybersitter. But I had waited too late. There was no patching things up at this point. Cybersitter and Norton 360 were duking it out. They were headed to divorce court. But neither one would leave the house.
So not only do I have these two programs completely blocking my access to the internet (and my email-- this marks me as a digital immigrant), but in trying to use the Repair function that comes with Cybersitter, it got stuck in a loop, refreshing an "information" box (a.k.a., an idiot box) every second. So I couldn't do anything on my computer. I could not get Cybersitter to open up to disable it.
Then I do what any self-respecting nerd would do: I try to boot Windows in Safe Mode. Not happening. Cybersitter had hijacked my safe mode. Fine, I thought. I went into my BIOS to changed the boot order. The computer should not have been able to boot from my hard drive.
But it did.
At that point, I gave up. We took it to the shop. They were able to work their magic and uninstall the divorcing programs. This magic, however, was not free. I spent $40 on the program and $50 removing it.
And now, I am back to having to look at a Princess Jasmine, topless.
1 comment:
Another sterling example of why technology isn't always better.
Pre-tech, all you had to do was go into his room, look between the mattress and box springs, and remove the offending magazines. It took two minutes and cost nothing.
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