Norton Utilities examines some interesting alternatives consumers would rather do than try to repair a dilapidated PC.

We don't know whether to be encouraged or frightened by a new "Consumer PC Frustrations" survey (PDF) conducted by Wakefield Research and commissioned by Norton Utilities, so we'll settle on being amused. The survey pinged 1,000 PC users and asked them a series of questions, starting with how they view trying to fix an aging PC. Of those surveyed, 27 percent of the female respondents said they'd rather go three days without a shower than try to fix an old computer, while a third of the male respondents said holding a significant other's purse in the mall while she tries on clothes is less painful.

Don't retire your home brewed aluminum foil deflector beanie just yet, there may be occasions where you'll still want to wear it. Take Symantec's source code snafu, for instance. When word got out that hackers had stolen certain source code from Symantec, the security firm initially brushed off the incident in the public eye saying the stolen code only applied to outdated software from several years ago. Not long after, Symantec advised pcAnywhere customers to stop using their product until it could release a patch. But what's really telling are a series of emails Symantec and the hacker responsible for the theft exchanged with each other.

You're not a rookie on the Internet anymore so it's inexcusable to lock down your online accounts with weaksauce passwords. We're sure your girlfriend's fly, but using her name as a password is a poor security practice, and so is using any of the commonly recognized passwords out there, like 123456 and iloveyou, to name just two. If you're serious about security, you're using multiple passwords that are difficult to guess, which can also be difficult to remember. Symantec wants to help.

Less than three weeks ago, security firm Symantec publicly downplayed the theft of a portion of its source code and said the stolen bits were from a 2006 enterprise version of its software. The message at the time was that the theft didn't affect Symantec's Norton products for consumer customers, nor were enterprise users as risk. In other words, chillax. Now Symantec is making the unusual recommendation of telling people not to use its pcAnywhere software.