Which is more painful, the illness or the cure?
In my life as a Windows user, I’ve learned that sometimes there will be problems. Not every day, because that would certify me as a masochist. Still, even with caution and safety harnesses and protective software up the yin-yang, there will be stormy moments. I’ve spent two evenings doing battle with a trojan/spyware infestation, and it meant that this was not a labour-free weekend.
Any time a computer starts to do things “all by itself”, you know something is out of whack. Mine started to launch IE windows when I changed sites in Firefox. Then, music began to play, even though I usually keep the sound muted. Not good. Remember, this is a computer with multiple layers of protection; anti virus, anti spyware, anti firewall intrusion, anti just about everything. Spybot announced that things were busy trying to Phone Home. Ad-Aware mentioned Vundo. The Google games could begin.
Many have witnessed; few have conquered easily. The biggest problem comes from those who await to have you load even more spyware in guise of cure. Snake oil merchants. I’m willing to reboot and erase and check logs; I had to do all of the above. Finally, my friends at McAfee gave the best advice, which was to download a process control program from Microsoft that permitted shutting down one job at a time. PID control for the GUI crowd. Then, by starting the antivirus scanner before I lost control of the machine, I was able (I think) to bring the infection under control. I’ll know better tomorrow, but right now my various scanning tools are reporting things are back to normal. I’ve also erased a lot of old temporary files and recovered a couple of gigs of space on a perpeptually full drive. Good stuff.
S0, back to the old and mundane. Work that is. The home computing is always ready to bleed for excitement.
