Spyware, Viruses and Scumbags
I just got to enjoy a great Saturday fighting with a few pieces of spyware/torjans/viruses on my photo editing machine here at home. SpyBot,AdAware and WebRoot all said it was clean. Same for AntiVir, Mcaffee and Norton. All of them said I was clean with no viruses and spyware. yet I kept getting random popups, winlogon.exe errors and other tell-tale signs that something was wrong.
I discovered a couple of things that suprised me. I tried a new virus scanner and a New anti-spyware package. out of the blue based on a reccomendation in a forum I was searching for solutions....
ewido for antispyware and avast for antivirus. after install both, updating them and rebooting into safe mode both found a couple hundred problems. that all the "big name" products could not detect or simply "ignored" for some reason. Avast is a free product for home use, ewido works for 30 days and costs $29.99 a year. I will be using both of these products from now on and reccomending them to clients.
Problem is, none of these problems would exist if microsoft actually made the OS secure. There is absolutely no reason that anything needs to write to the /windows directory. the registry is a piece of crap that no sane person has liked from the beginning and simply adopting the unix model that everything the user does is confined to the user directory would eliminate all this crud. if All I had to do was copy someone's personal files to a new profile and delete their old one to remove all viruses and spyware that would be a dream come true.
Unfortunately Microsoft does not have the desire to make it secure. They make lots of money from it being insecure and promises to make it secure. Because honestly shelling out $200.00 every 3-4 years for a new Operating System is really not needed.
There... my computer rant for the month is over.
I discovered a couple of things that suprised me. I tried a new virus scanner and a New anti-spyware package. out of the blue based on a reccomendation in a forum I was searching for solutions....
ewido for antispyware and avast for antivirus. after install both, updating them and rebooting into safe mode both found a couple hundred problems. that all the "big name" products could not detect or simply "ignored" for some reason. Avast is a free product for home use, ewido works for 30 days and costs $29.99 a year. I will be using both of these products from now on and reccomending them to clients.
Problem is, none of these problems would exist if microsoft actually made the OS secure. There is absolutely no reason that anything needs to write to the /windows directory. the registry is a piece of crap that no sane person has liked from the beginning and simply adopting the unix model that everything the user does is confined to the user directory would eliminate all this crud. if All I had to do was copy someone's personal files to a new profile and delete their old one to remove all viruses and spyware that would be a dream come true.
Unfortunately Microsoft does not have the desire to make it secure. They make lots of money from it being insecure and promises to make it secure. Because honestly shelling out $200.00 every 3-4 years for a new Operating System is really not needed.
There... my computer rant for the month is over.
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