Scipious already addressed some stuff, but whatever...
Do you realize I went to school for computing and then have experience with my hardware and software programs?
No, because you hadn't told that before and powerful though my mind is, it still has trouble accessing other peoples minds (I'm working on it though). Besides, a degree is never a surefire guarantee that you're actually good at the topic; there are quite a lot of incompetent people with all kinds of degrees in the world.
The fact that you can do something well doesn't mean that it can't be done better.
My computer runs faster than it ever has, especially since I used malwarebytes.
Faster than it ever has is not exactly a reliable measurement since it's relative to how it run previously. It does not mean that it could not run faster and better if you tried some other stuff. Like, for example, the fact that Firefox and Opera both run faster and more stable than Internet Explorer, don't hang or crash even half as often, load pages faster, start up faster and comply to the official W3-consortium defined standards waaay better than IE. And if you don't set them default browsers, there's no way they could ever mess up IE...
Why you keep questioning my methods when they are working?
I could throw the same question back to you. The fact that your methods work doesn't mean that other methods wouldn't work as well or better. Personally, I only have my own experiences to trust, and I only have bad experiences about Norton - though I suspect the Corporate edition might be different than personal edition, but no matter. It was a bloated piece of code that slowed down the startup procedure on my PC significantly and unnecessarily, and the firewall kept malfunctioning in a way that blocked all http/ftp protocol based connections - all browsers stopped working, but the connection itself worked fine; ping to router worked, pign to WAN worked, I could SSH connect to my uni account, it was just that the firewall process seemingly hanged at random times and couldn't be restarted/reseted without re-booting, which understandable became rather annoying very fast so I ditched Norton, tried F-Secure for a brief time, didn't have any specific issues but it was almost as bloated and massive startup slower as Norton was, so I moved to Avast!/Comodo antivirus/firewall combination, and haven't had any issues since then.
Also not that I am not questioning your methods per ce, but instead the certain knowledge you seem to have that you can't make things work any better at all. Things can always work better.
Do you have a computer degree? Have you spent countless hours on the net exploring other programs online and reading.
Again, degree is but an official badge of competence without as much real meaning as people would like to think. There are no reasons why self-taught people wouldn't have equal or better basic understanding of matters than people with an official degree on something, as long as we're not talking about a deeply specialized stuff. Computers is one of those things.
And yes, I would bet that many of the people on this forum and elsewhere on internets have spent a lot of time on testing different stuff, reading reports and doing their own experimentations on what works best. The general results tend to be that IE works worse than other options available, and similarly Norton tends to work a lot worse than free alternatives like AVG or Avast!. There are other examples as well, but getting overly specific wouldn't be worth the trouble.
However, if something works for you, who am I to deny that it doesn't work for you? I can question and suggest alternatives that work better for me, and you can - if you so choose - experiment the suggestions.
Is your computer super fast like mine and malware free?
I don't know, since I don't have your computer specs, either formal or tested, and I haven't used your PC (which is, in fact, the most reliable test of all). However, I would certainly hope that my PC is malware-free at the moment, since I haven't noticed anything out of ordinary, and the Spybot S&D test I run monthly usually just founds some tracking cookies and no more (and, incidentally, if I were using Internet Explorer it would keep finding a lot lot more stuff, and not so innocent either).
For a +3 years old computer, this thing is doing it's job really well. Wouldn't call it super fast but not a steamroller either.
Some people think they know it all. I hate that. I know I don't know it all but everything is working fine and I know that I know a lot. Stop questioning my methods when I know what I'm doing and when my way is working so good.
What Scipious said.... The fact that you don't seem to be willing to test Firefox/Opera/other alternative browsers tells me that you don't know all there is to know about them, for example. They are pretty much objectively proven to be better than IE on almost all regards (excluding compatibility with pages that are coded to work with Internet Explorer, ie. broken purposefully - like the page you mentioned). And it's not rumour talk either. Similarly I would suspect that no matter how fast as your computer seems to be working with Norton, you could get better results with lighter, free alternatives. Especially on boot cycle time. No rumours there either, but personal experiences with commercial antivirus mammoths. They just slow things down an inordinate amount on startup, and the free alternatives do as sufficient job with a lot less startup slowdown and/or system resources used.
I am also a member on the Yahoo Messenger support forum at www.bigblueball.com. So I know quite a bit about that program and tricks and tips about it, and also I know about using spoof emailers too and invisible checkers. But not programming. I can learn a lot there too about Yahoo and that is where I learned about malwarebytes. Are many of you zealous enough to take the time to learn all that out of choice?
Yahoo is something I have no interest in. At all. I don't need their services, and if anything they annoy me by those aforementioned toolbars that keep trying to sneak in my system with installers of other programs. Also, I have no illusions that I would ever know everything there is to know. I'm trying to concentrate on relevant issues, and I know and I'm still going to miss things occasionally. Getting information from other users around the Internet is an important source of info, but source criticism is to be applied on anything you haven't experimented yourself. I might check out the malwarebytes now that I know about it, and thus the information spreads.
I also have a program I bought online called Recover My Files that allows me to sometimes get back files that have long been deleted from my recycle bin. Also if you accidentally delete a picture of archive record, you can sometimes get it back as good as new. I also bought a special program called Pinnicle Game Profiler that allows me to play any pc game with a gamepad, even if the game was never made for that. It maps the buttons of the gamepad to the keyboard keys. I learned all this on my own and no help. Just by exploring certain programs by using certain keywords in google. I always use google as a search engine.
Well... that kind of file recovery only works if there hasn't been rewrites to that disk section, since deleting the file (in Windows at least) doesn't actually remove the data from hard drive, but reference to that information and frees that location for saving new data. Pretty much any data recovery utility will do that for you by scanning the raw data on disk without using the references to it on the filesystem, and reconstruct the files from the data. But like said, it only works if the whole file is still intact on the disk. And, like Scipious, I prefer not to delete things I want to keep...
About learning stuff - asking help is just as useful means of learning as independent research via google and other sources. Search engines are only helpful on relatively straightforward issues, more complex stuff is a lot more difficult to find that way, but if you post a help request on a forum related to matter, someone who knows about it will likely be there in a while to either help or point you to the information. So it doesn't really matter what you learn "on your own without help" and what you learn from others.
