Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Aargh!



Fending off a computer virus. Bear with me.

4 comments:

Bob said...

Germs are everywhere waiting to pounce on those not prepared or adequately protected :) Do you need a bigger sword?

Michael Wade said...

Bob,

No. I need a wider moat.

Michael

Bob said...

But a wider moat is just boring and isn't nearly as fun or flash as a brand new big sword you can carry around and show people :)

John said...

My latest adventure in fighting malware led me to the extreme brink of getting the hard drive reformatted and downloading whatever programs I wanted to keep -- still not knowing if the germ might be lurking undetected even there.

At the last moment I was persuaded to pony up a couple hundred dollars to let an outfit scrub everything, at the end of which (five-plus hours of remote scanning, etc.) the malware was still there! Before stopping payment one of the supervisors got on the phone and asked what browser I used. I told him the problem occurred on both Firefox and IE. When I opened Chrome at his suggestion, voila! No malware!

Those boogers were lurking in both browsers! So I've been using Chrome at my desktop ever since (and still running Firefox with no problem on the netbook - go figure).

I've decided that security packages may keep out the tigers and wolves, but they can't catch all the microbes and fungii.

Good luck.

~~~~~~~~~~~

(The two items that were my problem were one that put ads into my Facebook news feed and another that was a "search redirect" malware. Neither affected my little netbook, but both got into the desktop. As for suitable punishment for the perpetrators, I'm sure there is a place in eternity where those who launch such software will have to spend the rest of time in an unsuccessful effort to deal with some equally frustrating task. The Sisyphus story gives me great satisfaction.)