svtdragon

...Look closer. Zone uses eTrust. Check your services list. iSafe, the AV service, is labelled as by eTrust (I think, that's from memory anyhow.) At work we've installed NAV02-NAV04, then when they wouldn't give us replacements in a reasonable time for ones whose serials were cracked, we switched to McAfee 04-05 (for profit reasons- we got a small business deal with McAfee, thus we pay minimally for OEM software as long as we install it.) Norton is huge. Unbelievably huge. And grotesque to take off and put back on. BUT that doesn't mean it doesn't do a good job. I liked it when we used it. We have Symantec 8.0 on our tech system to dismount and scan HDD's with. At home, I used NIS05 (ugh, my mother downloaded it) on an older computer, and it's a beast. I do like NAV without NIS, though. I use McAfee Enterprise 8.0i on my rig, because it's light. Before that I used Zone Labs, and before that NAV05. Zone is light, but I don't trust it. I use AVG on another system, which is nice, but I don't use the system often enough to give it a plus-or-minus rating. It seems to keep out the bad stuff. Now, at work, we use McAfee 05, which is a royal PITA to put on for us (requiring numerous reboots as well as a user/pw, which is a pain to get from our customers). Norton was just click-it-and-go. From a tech's POV, Norton>McAfee. For my own use, I haven't been using McAfee Enterprise for long enough to judge.

Alright, I'm new here, but I'm a computer tech by trade so though there's a great deal that I don't know, there's a little that I do. Prepare thyself, for this post is of epic proportions. My system is as follows (for reference): AMD64 3500+ ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce 4) Dual 200GB SATA Maxtor Diamondmax 10's in an (nVidia NVRAID, not the SiI controller) RAID0 120GB PATA Maxtor Diamondmax 9 MSI nVidia GeForce 6800 That's all that's of significance for now, any questions, just ask. So, what happened is as follows: Waaaaaaay back in the day, I got the ever-common msdart.dll error during an upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro (I got a Corp version, I think, from my school, but it's got an activation no.) I used task manager to kill the process and it worked fine, installed, all the updates, etc. So, I ghosted that, with much, much effort, from what was a single hard drive at the time in an old system (1ghz Athlon/ASUS A7N8X-E/nForce 2) onto this RAID and assembled my purdy new system, and all was fine after I disabled DEP. Because nForce uses a unified driver set, everything worked fine and I just updated drivers and installed the new ones I needed. That was around Christmas time. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, I install a new TV Tuner card (which may be totally unrelated, unless I bumped a wire loose or something) and installed it. It worked fine. Last week I decided to update all my drivers, as I usually do every once in a while, starting with my nVidia graphics 71.74->71.89, then my nForce from 5.10->6.53, including installing the nVidia hardware firewall. And then I install McAfee Enterprise 8.01i off of the VPN from my school. And then, it freezes out of nowhere. Being a computer tech, I'm 99.99% sure my computer is virus- and spy/adware-free. First, I thought it was a firewall conflict with my ZoneAlarm Security Suite, so I disabled the nVidia firewall. Still froze. Uninstalled it altogether, because it had a service too. Still froze. Installed 6.39 nForce drivers, to make sure it wasn't the 6.53's. Still froze. Thorough CHKDSK (surface scan, etc, with repair) on all 5 partitions (3 on my 120GB, and 2 on my 400GB RAID, all primary) finds a few minor errors, fixes them, but not the freezing. My maxtor 4.09 diags have proven useless at reading SATA and I can't find a way to give it a RAID driver or anything... Haven't rolled back the video, or retried the 5.10's, because I can't. *facepalm* So I brought it into work today, it was fine, didn't freeze once (...kind of like bringing your car to the mechanic, when those noises mysteriously go away) after I installed my new Zalman 7700CU HSF, which required my removing the mobo and thus rewiring everything. So I figured it was a loose wire. I bring it home and the first thing it does is freeze. Alright, no problem, I'll just do an in-place upgrade. Only, I can't. I boot from my vanilla XP disk and use my RAID drivers and it sees everything fine, only doesn't give the option to repair an existing installation. Goes right to partitioning. So I reboot, slipstream SP2 onto another CD, and try that one, but this time starting the upgrade from within windows. So it goes happily along, reboots, I give it the RAID drivers with F6, and walk away... bad idea. I come back to the system (which must have rebooted) to the following: /Windows/System32/Config/System corrupt or missing, yada yada. So I look around for the solution, which involves either Last Known Good (which didn't work) or copying from /repair in Recovery Console, and so do that (I copied /system and /software) to no avail. I reboot and get the same thing. I boot off my disk again and it doesn't even say there's a repair in progress. So I figure hey, why not unplug my PATA drive since there's no OS on it, and XP setup keeps recognizing it as primary. So I do it. And then it recognizes there's an install in progress. Yay! Only, not. Because I tell it to continue that install and it goes a little ways, I feed it drivers with F6, it goes a little more, and then tells me it can't find the specified install path. Oh joy. So then I break out my ERD02 disk. I give it the drivers, and it goes a little ways without error, and says it can't find them, setup must exit, and reboots. And this, ladies and gents, is where my sanity comes to an end. Help. Please? Did I miss anything? I think I'm beyond virii to the point of PC Gremlins. Any PC Pesticide out there? I really don't want to have to do a fresh load and reload hundreds of GB of apps, not all of which I have access to... On an off note, does anyone know if the suicide rate is higher among PC techs than other professions? This is my own system, not a customer's, so I'd like to see it work... *grumble*