The opinionated ramblings and muses of a weary web victim.
Wear protection.....
Published on May 21, 2005 By Jafo In Personal Computing

A friend complained her XP machine was 'acting up' and brave old me said 'no sweat...I'm a consumate genius and modestly can fix it in a jiffy'.

She brung it over me joint and I rolled up the proverbials and got stuck into it.

Bit of a mess was putting it mildly....it hadn't a firewall or AV running for 'some time'.

I found a dozen or two 'issues' with it ...before pulling out the drive and chucking it in a caddy to load into my own machine...to do a thorough clean....

Norton got about 39 .... Pest patrol a further 26 then Ad Aware got the last...another 20 or so.....about 75 in all, ranging from key-loggers, 4 virii, trojan loaders and trackers...usual crap.

Then it was a simple case of copying all the 'data' to backup, full format, repartition and dump the data back on the 'D'.

All well and good.

Put the drive back into her machine...installed her XP and loaded a freeware ver of AVG.

Of course, that was out of date....needed new signature files, so I got on dial-up to update them....went to make a coffee.

Came back half an hour later....

ERROR on download.......

Something was wrong...so I did a drive scan with the 'old' AVG, and Ad Aware.....

303 hits

Oops, thinks I....perhaps it'd be wise to load that Zone Alarm first, before hooking to the net.

ZA pops up....."Ist.exe" wants access...."bugger off", I say.

A rush of frantic denials and several sweeps of the system later and I'm back to squeaky clean again.

Still....she's happy, now....

Moral of the story....get yer protection BEFORE hooking to the pox-ridden net...


Comments (Page 3)
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on May 25, 2005

they hang out at yahoo pool, champions zone,

Good...if they're all in one place a well placed incendiary will clean up the vermin...

We'll all go together when we go....there'll be no-one left in the afterglow....

on May 26, 2005
Here's something I thought was pretty funny...

About two weeks ago, my boss tells me he's getting a lot of pop-ups, and if I can check it out.

So I load up Ad-Aware and give it a scan...the results...well..see for yourself..



I just had to take a screenshot of it...I was amazed!
on May 26, 2005
i'll bet he's sold on Ad-Aware now though. should be a staple in any collection of maintence apps.
on May 26, 2005
That's...... insane... My current record is at 2,000+ on friend's computer.


Record on my own computer was about 500, 100% cookies.
on May 27, 2005
Good...if they're all in one place a well placed incendiary will clean up the vermin...


Good plan...need help?

We'll all go together when we go


Bad plan...trick is, to place the device, then move to a safe distance so you can witness your handywork..plus pick off any "lucky" ones that might escape..LoL
on Jun 06, 2005
Corky listed:

Step #4 - Go to Windows Update and install all patches I want.

Step #5 - Install AV and Internet Security software (I like Symantec, so that's the one).

Fuzzy corrected:

Do that the other way round. Don't even think about connecting without a firewall being installed



Fuzzy, I just felt an apology was due in case you drop by this post again.

Though I would prefer to get the patches for the OS before installing anything else, the reality is that you are correct. The process should have been reversed in these 2 steps.

Sorry for any indication of contradiction to your correction.
on Jun 08, 2005
Damn Hus! I thought the pc I just reformatted for someone else was bad at 700 plus infected files! But that is hilarious! I'm surprised you could even get Adaware on the machine to run it!
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