The joy of Microsoft Windows
A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I could do a cleanup on their Windows machine, because it was "running slowly" and they thought that they might have some spyware on the machine. Yes, I can do that, I said, bring it on down. And they did, and it sat there for about a week and a half. About 20 minutes ago, I pulled the machine out of the living room and connected it to the basement KVM switch, and turned it on. It booted up, only to present me with a machine that has an
- 1) Expired Norton Antivirus subscription.
- Strike One!
- 2) Internet Explorer, and only Internet Explorer.
- Strike Two!
- 3) Outlook as their mail client.
- Strike Three!
There were so many viruses and spybots on the machine that all it could do is pop up little alertboxes saying it was trying to connect to the symantec-loves-the-cock domain and a dozen or so other equally enlightening 'bot relay hosts. My grand scheme was to do a virus scan on the offending box, but I suspect that the only way to do it would be to plug the hard drive into a Linux machine and run clamav and a whole family of spybot catchers to sweep the machine clean.
There are days when I'm very, very happy that my primary web server is running a version of Linux that is approximately 13 years old. Today is about a dozen of them all combined into one.
Comments
I don't mind it most of the time; it at least gives me the chance to keep my hand in on non-non-windows PCs. And in this case, when I blow away and reinstall Windows, I'm going to also blow away Internet Big-Bag-O-Security-Violations #s 1 and 2, so that machine won't be nearly as much of a bug target as it is right now.
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This is why I don't 'fix' my friends computers, and smile as I remind them that it was they who encouraged to go into business for myself.