The message 4388845E.3010606@ukfsn.org from Ian bell ianbell@ukfsn.org contains these words:
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And as for multi-tasking, in reality very little of it occurs on the average PC.
And when it does, it's sometimes accidental.
A truly non-techy friend had his box slow right down on him, and someone mentioned spyware and viruses (He already had AVG, but with woefully old definitions) so he googled for 'spyware', was duly impressed and downloaded two more AV progs and two anti-spyware ones - none of which I'd even heard of.
Unfortunately, he gave them their head while installing so managed to get them all multitasking on bootup: and you can imagine the confusion, contention and contumacity...
Since his box is a PI 90, you may imagine how long it took to load Win98 - well, it was over 30 minutes, and then half his programs wouldn't work at all, and those that did took minutes to get going. DUN wouldn't, which was a bit of a bind.
I uninstalled all the AV/spyware stuff except AVG, and things were back to normal. Then it was time to go home.
The upshot is that I'm putting together a PIII 450 for him, and that will have the latest AVG and definitions up to date, SpyWareBlaster to filter the incoming stuff and Spybot S&D and AdAware to clean up afterwards - run on demand.
There's no chance of weaning him off the Evil Umpire, he genuinely doesn't have the time to get his head round Linux. (I do, but I keep procrastinating...)