For 24 hours I was in IT hell. A simple move to stop the onslaught of spam that was overwhelming my inbox turned into a nightmare. I was so gung-ho to increase my productivity by removing the spam that I overlooked some IT basics. Hopefully, you’ll learn from my mistakes.

A few weeks back, fed up with the amount of “enlargement” messages I was receiving, I purchased Norton Anti-Spam software. I installed it on the computer without reading any of the accompanying literature or studying the support site to see what snafus I might encounter.

Anyone in IT knows you always encounter some snafu. In my case, it was a big one: I couldn’t download e-mail or load Web sites in my browser. My old network manager is shaking his head as he reads this, I’m sure, thinking: “Did I teach her nothing?” Needless to say, my negligence led to a whole lot of frustration, lots of lost hours of work and these suggestions:

1. Always reboot once you’ve installed new software . Not all applications require it, but home-office types can go weeks without rebooting, and that’s how long it took me to realize there was an interoperability problem between Norton Anti-Virus and the rest of my system. I had to reboot for some other reason and when the computer came back up, I couldn’t download e-mail or Web pages. Because it had been a few weeks since I had installed the anti-spam tool, it took me a bit to realize that software was causing the problem. In fact, I called my cable provider, thinking it might be an issue on their side. He gloatingly told me to look at my security software.

2. Never install software without reading the support notes. Had I taken 5 minutes to either read the notes on the accompanying CD (the start-up guide was useless), the support site or even talked to some friends about using anti-spam software, chances are I could have headed this problem off at the pass.

3. Follow a process of elimination. I realized the cable guy was right about 2 seconds after I got off the phone as my AOL Instant Messenger client popped up. Had there been a problem with my Internet connection, that would have stalled out, too. Wasted time on the phone with him, to say the least.

4. Resist the urge to uninstall. My immediate reaction was to uninstall the software, thinking if I just get it off my system, all will be right with the world. Now, mind you, all this happened on a Saturday night and Sunday, so my usual cadre of support consultants was not available. I was flying solo on this one. The “uninstallation” caused its own problems as I realized after several tries that I should unhook from the Internet to do the uninstall – after all, the software was trying to reach a server that it couldn’t get to because it had blocked itself from it. On Monday, my IT friend told me that I didn’t have to uninstall at all – hindsight is 20/20.