I got a call today (Saturday) from Gateway wanting to check to see if I was having any problems with my recent purchace of a Gateway system. I am having trouble with the left mouse button only working half the time, but I didn’t want to get into that at the time, it still kind of works anyway. When I have nothing better to do I will call tech support.
But the reason I am posting is because the main purpose of the call was not to see if I was having any problems and get them fixed. It was to try to sell me a warranty since mine was only for 90 days. Now I remember getting a two year extended two year warranty on this machine so I was a bit concerned. She then clarified that I do have the extended warranty, this warranty is for my antivirus. I asked why would I want that, she had no answer and quickly ended the call. Now I do think everyone needs up to date antivirus protection, but you shouldn’t be tricking people into keeping up their subscription. I don’t really like the McAfee Security Center that came with the machine, it is bloated (though probably less than Norton) and keeps bugging me about updating SpamKiller which I disabled. I have yet to even register so my update subscription is no where near running out yet.
I don’t have any other virus protection on my machine though so I probably should do that soon as the definitions it came with are aging quickly. I am pretty careful about what I download, my email is scanned multiple times before it reaches me, and I rarely use Office or Internet Explorer so I am not that worried. After the trial subscription does run out I will probably be switching back to AVG Free. It seemed to be working fine on my previous machine, though it never had the opportunity to catch anything. I like how non bloated it is compared to the main alternatives. Scot’s Newsletter has a pretty good review of antivirus packages and AVG (though not the free version) came in third. Scot’s first choice, F-Secure, does sound pretty good though and is probably worth a trial.
Now that I have had this machine for a while, I guess you might wonder how I am liking it. I still hate the keyboard layout, I keep hitting the wrong keys and it still throws me off when using other keyboards. I do really love the battery life though. And I am still very happy with my non glossy screen which Dell has returned as an option. I guess I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the glossy screens. I just wish they had done it a bit sooner so I could be writing what I can’t stand about Dell instead. That would easily have pushed me over to buying the Dell. Though now that I have this amazing battery life I am somewhat glad I didn’t.
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