Struggling with the laptop, I was trying to swap the CD ROM drive for the floppy drive. These drives share the same bay and can be interchanged. An application allows a hot swap without dealing with a reboot or plug-n-pray. But, no amount of coaxing and repetition could convince Windows to recognize the new drive. I tried removing hardware and re-installing drivers. I tried google. No joy. I gave up. As a work around, I went to another pc on the network and enabled sharing of its media drive. Loading my CD on that one I was able to access it.

Next challenge: upgrade to Norton 2004. This latest includes anti-everything. For some reason the install did not overwrite my 2001 version. ( ! ) There was no explanation nor option just a single line saying that anti-virus was already installed on my system. Nevertheless I continued to follow the dialog box prompts out of curiosity to see the outcome (and partially because I thought I’d screw it up if I aborted). The end result was 2001 and 2004 in series in the system tray. Norton appeared to function but my outlook express, which is intertwined, balked. I used the remove programs utility to uninstall 2001 and then reinstalled 2004. This solved the email glitch but now the Norton app is hinky. Need some help here.