I loved you, you bastard.

Peter Norton used to live in my computer. Every week in the '90s, he'd pop up looking rather tough in a geeky way and he'd check my files for viruses.

Recently, though, those people who use his name decided to phase out the copy of Norton Anti-Virus I'd been updating faithfully every week since 1995. Suddenly I couldn't check my boot sectors.

Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus 2005 was so slow, that I disabled it regularly when I had to do work, which was pretty much all the time. Norton Personal Firewall 2001 was okay, but I had to disable it when I was burning a CD, because the kids didn't play nicely together.

So I got that virus.

Once it was all cleaned up, I decided it was time to move on. I started using Kaspersky Anti-Virus, which runs on everything, and Webroot Firewall for my 98SE computers and the Windows XP firewall for this thing here.

Symantec wouldn't go quietly, of course, its Virtual Device Driver entry threatened all my 16-bit programs. I don't even know what business it had with my 16-bit programs.

But that's that, the one program I'd had on every PC I ever owned is no longer on any of them, and my network is a swingin' land of joy now.

I loved you, you bastard.