Last Updated on December 4, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
We are still advising most of our business clients to try to purchase new machines with XP Pro instead of Vista. We were just referred to a new client who had been going through a nightmare trying to network 3 machines running Wintotal’s Aurora Appraisal Software. They had been hit by lightning and had to purchase new machines. They went with Vista Home Premium.
The machines would not talk over the network. Every time a client tried to connect, the whole network would lock up. They had spent countless hours with Wintotal’s tech support and had two consultants in prior to us. Things would lock up so bad you had to reboot everything including the router
After a lot of troubleshooting I finally concluded that Norton 2007 Internet Security was somehow blocking the traffic even though the network was set as trusted, the firewall was turned off and everything was opened up as far as possible. Fortunately they were running on a 30 day trial so I did a regular uninstall and then ran the Norton removal tool on the server and a client. Everything worked perfectly.
They purchased a copy of AVG antivirus and I turned the Windows firewall on. Our experience with AVG is that it is a great app. The machines are used for very little recreational surfing. I like Norton but it appeared that the mix of Aurora, Vista Home Premium and Norton IS 2007 just didn’t want to play well together.