User-friendly technology

My system at home is due for a backup, as Norton Systemworks kindly reminds me every time I turn the machine on. Last night, it finally got me worn down enough to start the Norton Save 'n' Restore utility to burn a CD. I did a full system backup a couple of months ago, so I only really need to do an incremental backup now (only new and changed files). I selected the directories and files to pick up, clicked OK to start the backup and went downstairs for twenty minutes.

When I went back upstairs, I find that my backup is still processing . . . and it's only at 5% completion. Hmmm. Odd, that. There's only a couple of hundred megabytes of data to work with here, so why is it taking so long? After a few more minutes with no further sign of success, I kill the backup process and start over again.

This time, after half an hour, it managed to get to 3% before going off into the weeds. Crap! The error messages are remarkably unhelpful, but they do provide a link to the Symantec web site. Fine, let's go there to see what's the likely cause of the problem.

Oh, but wait. Symantec wants me to install some ActiveX controls to allow it to diagnose my problem . . . and, of course, it won't allow me to use any browser but IE. So, I copy the URL into an IE window, download and install the ActiveX controls, and . . . hey! presto! . . . it doesn't find any issues. But it directs me to another page . . . which is full of bonehead-level "help". You know the sort of thing you get when you call first-line support at an ISP: "Is your computer plugged in?" "Is it turned on?" "Does anything appear on the screen?"

But it's too late to worry about it now. I just shut down the machine and went to bed.

This morning, rather than running the Norton backup utility, I decided to just run a manual backup with Nero. It's less than half a CD's worth of data, so I can easily do that before getting breakfast. But Nero can't manage to burn a CD either. As soon as it starts to write to the blank CD, it spits out a bunch of errors about unregistered calls and goes off into the weeds.

One software package going weird — it happens. Two of 'em? That implies either operating system problems or hardware issues.

Anyone taking bets on how long it'll be before I manage to run a successful backup?