It’s easy to identify an action or goal; sometimes it’s easy to complete them and cross them off your list. However, it is the maintenance actions that really make a difference. For instance, in terms of losing my pregnancy weight I could just think about reaching my pre-pregnancy weight, but the real desired outcome is to maintain that weight. This means when I reach that weight I don’t stop exercising, instead I move to the maintenance level of exercise and diet.
This is currently on my mind because I am in the process of reinstalling software on to my laptop after I reformatted at the weekend. Yes, less than two months since I bought it. After buying the laptop, my first tasks were to remove Vista and install XP, remove the preinstalled software I didn’t want and to install AVG antivirus. Then I moved on to the business of installing other software and moving across my files.
Unfortunately it seems something went wrong either with the installation of AVG or with my settings so in the last two months a full scan had not taken place and I did not check. Even though I spent a lot of time in AVG to work out why the email scanner was not working I didn’t notice the main antivirus hadn’t run until I had been infected by at least one virus (the one I noticed redirected my google searches).
This is certainly an example of crossing an action off my task list without really thinking about my desired outcome. In this case my desired outcome was to have a virus free laptop.
I hope, the time taken to reformat and reinstall software will re enforce the lesson that I need to think about a task before I cross it off my list; has this task achieved the desired outcome or are there follow up / maintenance tasks?
On the positive side, I am very grateful for my external hard drive as it makes backing up files easy and for my software registry so I know what software I want to reinstall and where to get it from.
Since version 8 of AVG came out, I’ve found it very poor, and have moved PC, laptop and Katie’s laptop over to Avast instead – worth a try if you’re having troubles with AVG.
Gary, thanks for the advice. Does Avast have an email scan?
I tried Avast and Avira to try and resolve my problems, but neither of them worked. However I think this may have been because the installations got corrupted due to the viruses. AVG is running fine since my reformat and I check every few days to ensure the scans are taking place!
Yes, the free version I’ve got comes with 7 modules – Web Shield, Standard Shield, P2P Shield, Outlook / Exchange, Internet Mail, Network Shield and Instant Messaging.