Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Today, I invested several hours into fixing my brother’s spy-ware and virus infected laptop. How one can mess up a system quite like this laptop is beyond me.
It’s been awhile since I had to concern myself with spy-ware and or virus infections. I use an Apple machine, and have had no such problems with it. I suppose I’ve taken for granted that Apple has, for the most part, avoided the mess of open vulnerabilities. Regardless, even my girlfriend, who runs a Windows machine, hasn’t had any problems since she ditched Internet Explorer several months ago. And let me tell you, I love her even more just for taking my advice and ridding herself of that spy-ware-welcoming browser. If only my family members could listen for once and take my advice. Instead, I’m stuck fixing their ignorant mistakes.
As a result, I quickly wrote up a small document for my brother to place near his laptop. At first I thought it’d be a good idea to write in big bolded capped letters — DO NOT FUCKING USE INTERNET EXPLORER. But I held back and made a small checklist of what he should do to keep his laptop spy-ware, and virus, free.
All in all, I got rid of his piece-of-shit AOL virus scan. I found this to be the bottleneck. As soon as I uninstalled this software, I found myself making progress. I downloaded, installed, and ran, Ad-Aware 2007. This picked up most of his spy-ware issues. Then, I bought Norton 360 to help all his Internet and virus protection needs. Norton 360 handled all virus issues.
Now, four hours later, his laptop is running a lot more smoothly. I cannot wait to shut this laptop down and return to my OSX normalacy.
Phew.
