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I moved into Cox territory in North San Diego County at the end of February 2007.  At that time, my downloading speed typically ran about 8.2 Mbps, which I thought odd inasmuch as I'm only paying for the advertised 7 Mbps.  Over the next month and a half, I sometimes saw speeds as high as 11.x Mbps.  In recent weeks, my dowloading speed has dropped, on average, little by little to about 2.x Mbps.  Occasionally, I've seen speeds as high as 6.x Mbps.  I haven't called Cox yet about the low speed because, for some strange reason, I don't notice my web pages are loading any slower at 2.0 Mbps than they did when I was getting 11.x Mpbs.  However, I plan to call Cox for whatever it's worth to inquire about this speed issue one day soon.

I downloaded and installed the Cox Security Suite in early March, and it was a continual headache until I removed it yesterday.  There was apparently a conflict with a Google time/calendar gaget that caused my system's time to advance one hour periodically.  Another problem was key stronkes were dropped when typing into a user ID or password field periodically.  That problem was solved by resetting the parameters of Internet Explorer 7 to factory settings.  Still another problem that was never solved was the phishing function periodically could contact the mother ship and had to be reset periodically.

The biggest problem of all was the suite software started slowly or not at all upon booting the computer.  When it wouldn't start, it used 100% of my CPU time and prevented almost anything else from running.  After a fresh install, the suite would run OK for a few days and then begin its slow-starting behavior and finally not start at all.  At that point, it was often very difficult to remove the suite from the computer.

Last night after the suite wouldn't start again, I, with great difficulty, removed it again from my computer and attempted another fresh installation.  This time, the suite wouldn't install after several attempts.  So, I called Authentium, which is the manufacturer of the suite for Cox for the umteenth time.  After the tech listened to my dreary complaint, he told me the suite won't run properly with XP Pro, which I'm using, and some other operating system I forget.  He said Authentium is recommending AVG security software for systems that won't run the Cox Security Suite.  In addition, he told me there wasn't much hope the problems with the Cox suite running on XP would ever be resolved because the software engineers are busily working on a suite for Vista.   Consequently, my opinion of Cox Communications, at the moment, is very, very low.

I did download and install a 30-day trial copy of AVG, and it seemed to work well except for one very bad thing.  The speed of my computer was reduced to a crawl.  So, I quickly deep-sixed AVG.

Today, I downloaded and installed a 30-day trial version of PC-cillin Internet Security 2007, which is running fine at the moment.  However, this software doesn't contain ad and pop-up blocking.  So, I turned on Explorer's pop-up blocking function, which seems to be working OK.  However, I'm still short an ad-blocking function.

I've got a solution for you.. ditch the lame suites and install Avast Anti-Virus (Free for home use!) and use firefox with AdBlock Plus and filterset G updater.... No ads, no popups, no viruses.

Chrsi