Constrained Bliss Point

My previous post on anti-virus software had an interesting unforeseen consequence. As you surely remember, I made brief mention of Vipre Antivirus since I had given it a shot before trying Kaspersky. I thought the mention was just idle flavor text, to improve the narrative of my story. Moreover I thought that no sooner would my post be published than my mention of Vipre would be forgotten. I could not have been more mistaken.

The good people at Sunbelt Software must have some sort of Google alert or equivalent set up, searching for mentions of Vipre. Very quickly I was notified of a comment on my post, wherein Sunbelt apologized for any inconvenience and invited me to submit the offending file. After I emailed them a nice guy named Joe followed up and thanked me for my submission.

So, if you’re on the market for anti-virus software, I say give Vipre a try. They’re clearly dedicated to customer service.

Friends, I have a story of an unlikely advertisement achieving its purpose.

Over winter vacation I purchased a netbook, a Dell Mini 10v. It’s an adorable little thing, really gets the job done, and it has a solid feel I haven’t experienced since the old Thinkpad T series, back when IBM made laptops. I’m quite happy with my little netbook. Alas, every copy of Windows needs its antivirus protection. I haven’t had to even think of antivirus software in about four years now: RPI students got a corporate version of McAfee as part of the laptop deal.

A trial version of McAfee came preinstalled on my mini, and I actively shunned it. I heard about a new antivirus called Vipre (like the snake), decided to give it a try. I wasn’t too happy with the trial, though, mostly because it kept deleting the BIOS update I was trying to download. I’m not sure if that’s standard practice, but I distinctly remember telling the program not to delete my BIOS update. It remained obstinate.

So I decided to do some research. Apparently Norton is still the best around, according to a few sites doing antivirus reviews, but one particular product caught my eye. Kaspersky antivirus jumped out at me, because of a ridiculous little video circulating around the interwebs:

That is insanely catchy, and awesome in a ridiculous way. You can see how Kaspersky was stuck in my mind this whole time, just waiting until I needed antivirus software. I also recall one of my economics professors lauding Kaspersky in his technological change class. He liked the idea that Kaspersky keeps track of which files change between scans, and only re-scans those that need to be. Technological progress indeed.

Anyway, I hope Kaspersky is as awesome as that video makes it seem.