General @ Wednesday January 20, 2010 10:39 am by WunderKraut
I feel fine….
I feel happy….
Yeah, so the family desktop caught a virus. Its that dang Virus Scan 2009 or whatever that pops up to tell you that you have a bazillion infections and you need to buy their product. Oh, it also puts nice pr0n links on your desktop. Lovely little thing.
For whatever reason, it keeps slipping past my virus scanner. If I catch it, I can kill it before it installs, but this time it did it to either Jen or the kids and well, its dead Jim!
But on the plus side, I was running out of room on my hard drive and that hard drive was 4 years old, so it gave me an excuse to do a clean install on a new hard drive.
The biggest issue right now is getting Norton back on the computer. I swear, Norton has THE WORST website I have ever seen! No joke. It took me 30 minutes of hunting around the site to find a place to log into my account. That tends to be one of the first things people need to do you know…geesh.
Anyway, I found my license and yet trying to download it caused the site to time out. Sitting on hold for 40 minutes last night was no fun. I logged a service ticket today. Maybe I can get this thing resolved.
Once I get Norton back up and running, I will either hook up the old hard drive to get my data or use my Carbonite backup. I would rather get it from the hard drive as that would be faster, but not sure if it will work. The virus lives in the registry and is not attached to the files I need, so the risk is very low, but not sure I can get it to do what I want. We shall see.
Not having the desktop has cut into my writing time. I could use our laptop, but the “A” key has gone missing. Oh sure, you can still type an “a” but it takes a bunch of effort and really slows things down to a crawl. Who knew so many words have the letter “a” in them?
5 Responses to “I’m Not Dead…”
I’m still here too dude. I dig the Star Trek references; throw a few of them in and I will forgive just about any lapse in posting. And the ‘a’ key excuse is a new one. Highly original and almost believable.
I use Computer Associates Virus and fire wall software and I never get a cold…. Your welcome to my compy of it cause it’s free.
PAPAPA
Yeah, I use AVG Free and Advanced System Care (free) and never have a problem. I used to use Norton, and had many, many issues. I don’t think that Norton makes a bad product, however, I DO think that people write code that specifically targets Norton users.
Another reason to consider a MAC.
Anyway, you should see if Carbonite can mail you DVD of your system drive. I use a similar offering through “MOZY.com”, and they offer at a nominal cost a DVD copy of your files – for a speedy recovery.
Your only way to kill this thing will be to boot up a copy of the virus scanner from another bootable source. You may be able boot-up on a USB flash drive. You have to interrupt the boot-up process, and go into Safe Mode. While there you should be able to change the settings were you allow the next bootup to occur using the USB drive (with the Virus Scanner preloaded). This is the only way the virus can be rooted out of the registry.
Of all things, do not, and I mean do not try loading the older hard drive onto this PC. The risk of virus transfer still exists.
Make sure the laptop also does not share the home network with the PC. Quarantine the desktop.
You may have already gone through these steps. I apologize if I am being presumptuous or redundant. Let us know what happens.
-Tejash
Yeah, this new virus scanner lets me make a bootable disk for such emergencies….I plan on doing that.
Carbonite is my friend today!