what’s he building in there?

the title is from tom waits. i have a laptop running windows sitting on my desk next to the mac now, and the thing is always making some form of noise. it’s always seemingly working on something, even though i know it should just be sitting quietly, waiting for when i really use it. a couple of days ago something popped up and informed me an update was available for some kind of control panel. i said ok, sure whatever knock yourself out, update away.
it installed a toolbar in IE that, although it was almost certainly spyware, looked really cool in the browser and gave me some ideas about some work i was doing. of course it wasn’t all that cool to have to track the beast down to uninstall it, but that’s another story. truth be told, i think it has just gone into stealth mode, lying dormant in a control panel somewhere ready to inform the next sucker mac-switcher that an update is available. i checked the anti-virus app, it tells me everything is kosher. still, i listen to the harddrive spinning away and wonder what exactly is going on in there. just like the never resting drive in that machine, i am too busy to sniff the packets coming in and out.
then again, i could just be paranoid and tired.