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The laptop I ordered had finally arrived. And guess what I ran into on the first day?

Let me explain. After receiving the box, which by the way was built at Shanghai, and I love stuff made in Shanghai, I unpacked it, snapped in the battery, hooked up the power adapter and powered it on. The initial setup is very easy. I took all the defaults except for the name, address and time zone information. And then I rebooted, it found my wireless lan and I was browsing the internet. Cool.

I played a DVD, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and it looked fantastic. The movie is great too, better if you natively speak Szechuanese.

Then the little bubble popped up telling me "your Windows updates are ready to install. Just click here." I clicked, choosing the Express option as recommended. (Do you know that the phrase "Expression Option (Recommended)" was present in MS-DOS installation screens?) The bubble popped down to the notification area, saying, "Go back and work as usual. Don't mind me. I'll tell you when I'm done."

Hours later. The above screen. The Windows Updates installation had stuck at the "Genuine Advantage Notification" step. Apparently it is trying to talk to the great folks at Microsoft over the internet. And the firewall software was blocking it. I right clicked on the Norton Internet Security tray icon trying to bring up the control center screen. The screen wouldn't fully materialize. That's when I took the screenshot.

And it gets better. I can't close it either. Clicking on the little red "X" on the upper right corner has no effect whatsoever.

This is where a normal user (you know, the kind who wouldn't open their Packard-Bell boxes fearing that it would void the warranty) would have trown the thing back at the store. "It doesn't work" would have been an adequate description of the problem.

But being the power user that I am, knowing a thing or two about WM_QUIT and WM_DESTROY and taskman.exe, I fired up the task manager and tried to kill the process. No. It refused to die that way either.

You know where this is going, don't you? The next thing I tried is to log off the user. BTW, it's "log off" on Windows but "log out" on Linux. (Just thought you'd appreciate the fine distinction of terms here.) No luck. Trying to reboot won't work either.

Time to hit the power button. Thank God that worked.

I have since uninstalled Norton software because it's f***ed up. (For those who don't know me that well, I don't usually use ths sort of language. Imagine hearing these words uttered by someone nice, like, say, Mother Teresa.) (I can see the shock on your face.) I'm running unprotected for now, so don't be sending me any viruses.

I'm open to suggestions on alternative virus protection software for under $40/year.