Monday, July 18, 2005

This Is Your Computer On Spyware...

Aghhhhhhhhh. I was setting up a bittorrent gmail setup like they showed on G4's 'Attack of the Show' and the site they pointed me to infected my computer with the worst unremovable spyware I've ever seen. I'm a little peeved that AOTS led me to a site that did that. They're probably singlehandedly responcible for thousands of infections. I tried about 6 free and trial anti-spyware programs to no avail. Looking through the registry runservices, CWS shredder, nothing worked. Finally wound up trying Spy Doctor for 20 bucks with a coupon. It seems to have gotten rid of the spyware but The spyware is still popping up this website asking me if I need a home loan. It's the same site everytime. I hope those people die of cancer. IE is opening real slow and opening a new window takes about 10 seconds now which feels like a lifetime to me. At least the spyware didn't affect FireFox. It's enough to make you switch your default browser. I think I'm going to have to do a reinstall to get everything back to normal. It sucks but it's not the end of the world. I have a good data OS partition strategy to make it relatively painless. My Office install has been giving me some trouble for a while and SQL server & tools are screwed up from testing different versions so I'm not feeling too bad about it. MS really has some work to do on IE. Either that or fix up their free antispyware tools so they work.

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