Should have known better

I installed Norton Antivirus 2004 Pro edition on my laptop recently (I actually paid for Pro so that I could give my younger sister a copy to run on my old laptop; you get two licenses for less than the cost of two copies of the regular version).

Well, I was surprised to find that NAV keeps Windows Messenger open in the background, so that it can screen it for bad things happening. That wouldn't be so bad except that it eats 20MB.

I was also surprised just now when Outlook Express (a neccessary evil) decided to reply to a message that came in over news:// using Outlook. An ill-fated sequence of events led to this disaster. Having now corrected the configuration of the beast, I'm considering giving Outlook 2003 a second chance.

I just noticed the memory usage:

Outlook.exe 31MB
msmsgs.exe 22MB
winword.exe 23MB

Ouch. I don't even (officially) have Word or msmsgs (messenger) open; they are secretly loaded by other apps.

Surely you don't need much more than a couple of MB to check your email??