Saturday, December 29, 2007

The Moral of the Story

(But I'll spare you the week-long story.)

Windows Vista will not connect your laptop to the Internet unless you have some kind of Norton anti-virus software installed. You don't even have to have an active subscription--you just have to have it installed or you will get nothing but that cursed Local Access Only message until you do. McAfee doesn't work; it must be Norton. There is no way around this. Not even plugging directly into the router or DSL modem with an ethernet cable will work.

This is assuming, of course, that the moral of my story can be generalized to all Vista-running laptop owners in the world. I assume that's a safe assumption.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

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This reminds me of my friend RC's anti-Windows blog.....

Abelard Enigma said...

Windows Vista will not connect your laptop to the Internet unless you have some kind of Norton anti-virus software installed.

Sorry, that's not true. You can run Vista and connect to the internet without any antivirus software installed (although, that would be very dumb).

It sounds to me like it was a firewall issue, and installing Norton installed the Norton firewall which disabled with Windows firewall (which was configured incorrectly and, thereby, was not allowing internet connection).

It's late, was anything I just typed above coherent?

B.G. Christensen said...

Coherent, but WRONG!

Okay, I don't really know enough to argue with you, but I did try turning off Windows firewall in the midst of all this, to no avail. And apparently the Local Access Only problem is something common among Vista users, judging by the MS boards, but it seems to be something much more random than it turned out to be in my case, where uninstalling and reinstalling Norton made clear markers at either side of the problem.

I really like the title of RC's blog.

Katria said...

Umm... Yeah, sorry. It is not all laptops. Just yours. Mine loved me and connected with McAfee nae problemo. And then I downloaded BYU's anti-virus software and got rid of McAfee and all is well with the world again.

Braden said...

Ugh, Vista.

Scot said...

Why must you struggle against the will of Microsoft?

Just accept it.

B.G. Christensen said...

I did. That's why Foxy's laptop connects to the Internet now.

Chris said...

Just buy a Mac.

JB said...

Wait, are you saying Windows is refusing to work with more than one program?? It boggles the mind!!

Seriously, though, that's really dumb. Glad you were able to get it figured out. . . Do you have a copy of Norton on there now?

B.G. Christensen said...

Yeah, I just downloaded the free trial.

We'll consider buying a Mac next time.