new anti-virus software installed

Denis Grey, Toronto Centre president, decided to tackle the "clean up" of the CAO living room / kitchen computer. I noticed him fussing around after breakfast, doing things in the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs, cursing under his breath, sitting there, staring at the screen. I heard lots of hard disk activity. Finally, after a couple of hours at the machine, he announced to me that he had installed new anti-virus software.

Good to chat about this with your information technology chair...

"Pardon?" I asked.

He echoed what he had done. He pointed out the Norton Anti-Virus software had expired; he removed it and replaced it with AVG. "It's free, you know."

Yes, I know.

I asked him if he had considered "pre-checking" the computer with online virus scanning tools.

He had never heard of that. Uh huh.

I suggested he do a cross-check using Trend Micro. Don't think he ever did that...

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Later when I checked the machine, I see he installed the Yahoo! toolbar into the browser! Why? He's probably added a lot of unnecessary junk, now that I think about it... That will need to be removed. It might do more harm than good.

I looked at the Windows desktop. Litter! He had download the executable to the desktop and left it there. And there were new icons for the AVG and other items installed. What a mess. I removed them.

Why didn't he talk to me about any of this? Why didn't he ask for some commentary or support? Why didn't he ask me to double-check things?