Saturday, December 01, 2007

Would you help me? My PC is...

I'm sure we've all heard this. Yesterday, I spent about 2.5 hours at a friends house working on her PC problem. She's a semi-pro photographer and makes a decent living from taking pictures of the kids in the local schools and selling the shots to the parents.

The situation for her was that she had some kind of a trojan that kept telling her machine was infected, slow or hijacked and then it would bring up a web browser that pointed to a site to download some software to solve the problem. I'm sure there's no connection between the trojan and the site/software that is brought up in the browser. Some interesting reminders came out of the house call:

  1. People, if you don't have an AV (anti-virus) program installed you are nuts. Get with the program. There are two types of computer users: Those that have been affected by a virus/trojan/malware and those that are about to be.
  2. Are you doing backups? If not why not?
  3. Are you checking that your backups actually work? Try restoring a file sometime and see what happens.

Oh, and a rant for Norton's product: I told my friend to drive over to Circuit City, grab Norton, install it and she'd be okay. I was wrong. COME ON YOU GUYS! Don't sit there telling me that the "hijack" has been taken care of and then have it pop right back up again. Idiots.

Raves for Microsoft. I went to their web site where they offered me a virus scan. They found the problem and eliminated it - for FREE. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Thompson (CEO, Symantec) - looks like Microsoft one-upped you in your own back yard.


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2 comments:

gpoguy said...

Classic.
A couple years back at the MVP summit they gave us all T-Shirts that said, "No, I will not fix your computer". I wear it whenever I visit my folks :)

BTW, I don't run anti-virus. I find it a performance drain and, unless I'm really stupid ( I try hard not to be), fairly useless.

Unknown said...

Symantec?!?! Not since Peter Norton left have they put out a decent product. I've been running free avg antivirus for years without any issues. It's light on the system and free.
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/2/