NAV2009 in not recognised by Windows/XP SP3

I have just installed Windows/XP Service Pack 3 and guess what? Norton Anti-Virus 2009 is not recognised by it!

I got onto Symantec and their fix was to

1. Settings
2. Control Panel
3. Security Center
4. Click "Virus Protection"
5. Click the "Recommendation" button
6. Check the box for "I have an antivirus program that I'll monitor myself"

This stops the "Your computer might be at risk" balloon from appearing but it does mean that I have to verify that NAV2009 is up and running every time I start my PC and at regular intervals thereafter!

I guess my days of using Norton for anti-virus software are numbered as it does not appear that they are very good about making sure that their product works with ease!

Cannot Print with PDFCreator

After many hours of trying to diagnose a problem with PDFCreator I think I have found the culprit as Norton Antivirus 2009 (NAV2009).

The problem I had was that (prior to upgading to NAV 2009) PDFCreator created PDFs files without any problems. Immediately after upgrading to NAV 2009, the print process seems to start but I never got the PDFCreator save dialog box.

Looking into this more carefully, I opened the PDFCreator printer which showed no jobs. When I started a print job from any application (e.g. MSIE, EXCELL, notepad) I noticed that the job was spooled to the printer and the status of the print job (in the PDFCreator printer window) started as Spooling-printing and then changed to Printing and then changed to "Deleting - Printing - Printed". These different statuses all occured in less than one second.

I was using PDFCreator 8.1 and so I upgraded to PDFCreator 9.6 but still got exactly the same results. Eventually I looked at the Norton Antivirus 2009 logs and lo and behold there were many entries for:

• Risk Level = Medium
• Activity = Unauthorized access blocked (Open Process Token)
• Status = Blocked

In every case the "Actor" was "C:\program files\pdfcreator\pdfspooler.exe" and the "Target" was "C:\Program Files\Norton AntiVirus\Norton AntiVirus\Engine\16.0.0.125\ccSvcHst.exe".

I will report this problem to Norton and see if they have a solution to their problem.

UPDATE: 2008-10-14 00:46 GMT - Norton have given me a problem number.......

Installing a USB disk drive on Linux is easy

I did not appreciate how easy it was to add a new USB disk drive to a Linux system.

I only needed temproary access to the disk drive on a Linux system so that I could format the disk as a Linux partition.

The steps were:

1. Plug the USB disk drive (a Western Digital My Book Office Edition External Hard Drives 500 GB, USB 2.0, Remote Access WDH1B5000N)
2. As root (su command)
   1. cd /mnt
   2. mkdir usb_disk
   3. mount /dev/sda1 usb_disk
   4. /sbin/fdisk /dev/sda
      1. p (to show and verify the partions)
      2. Changed the required partition to have an id of 83 - Linux partition
      3. w (to write table to disk and exit)
   5. umount /dev/sda1
   6. /sbin/mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1 (being a 500 GBytes disk, this took around 3 hours)
   7. mount /dev/sda1 usb_disk
3. Copy the files to the USB disk

It really was as easy as that. Considering that the version of Linux (Red Hat Linux release 7.2 Enigma ) was over 7 years old and it was running on a Pentium processor (not even a Pentium 2), that is very impressive!