Clean Slate
It had finally reached a point that I could no longer take the abuse it was giving me. My computer, with a mind of its own, would occasionally pop up a virus notification within Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I was alarmed by these particular events, because within whatever means I have, I will avoid IE like the plague.
I knew I had a bug, and it was entrenched deep. For a few weeks I entertained the idea that the Trojan upon my machine was benign, and the worst it could do was annoy me with it's frequent advertisements. It wasn't until after I had decided to remove the bug that I found how deeply it was rooted.
I'd like to think that I'm somewhat of a knowledgeable user, and I can remove the occasional occurance of malicious software from my machine. In this case, I was wrong.
A fortnight of safe mode checks, and registry edits and I could not find why IE was telling me that I needed friends, pills to make my cock bigger, a larger line of credit and a new anti-virus software. My normal routine of checking my e-mail was not yet disturbed, so thus far this wasn't a problem. That was, until the parasite on my machine placed a monitoring device on my system, and was installing other trojans and spyware from a remote server.
The rest of my evening progressed like this
- 8:15 - Finish all important backups, boot with Windows XP CD
- 8:35 - I'm allowed to pick a partition, and set the clock and timezone
- 8:45 - Windows stops copying systems files long enough to ask me what my Workgroup is going to be.
- 8:55 - I'm given 15 seconds to watch a countdown, or I can just reboot my computer right now
- 8:59 - The last romp through networking configuration wasn't enough, now XP wants to know if I'm using DHCP or not...
- 9:27 - Windows crunches for quite some time, then tells me that I need to reboot, or I won't be able to use my networking
- 9:30 - Windows has restarted, and I still don't have networking. I plug in my little USB key, and start installing my SATA drivers
- 9:34 - After watching the damn machine unpack a file for about five minutes, It tells me that this particular driver isn't certified by M$FT, "Would you like to continue?"
- 9:37 - I can access my second hard disk, and start to install Norton. You can't be too careful on the internet these days.
- 9:56 - Norton has decided my machine is clean, I grab the network drivers off the USB key
- 10:02 - It's the millionth time I've rebooted this peice. Now I can get on the internet
- 10:04 - Immediately grab FireFox
In the end, a clean installation of Windows is like sliding into a clean pair of underwear. It's good to know that you've hit a level of freshness. Although, this particular freshness can only be obtained through a painful voyage through the ghost in the shell.
Standing on the OS soapbox, I wondered aloud why it has to be this complicated. It took me, a person who knows his way around a keyboard, almost two hours to install enough software so my machine can get on the internet without contracting a virus. How in the world is the average computer user supposed to be able to pull this off effectively. I could have just made some sort of LiveCD, but I'm hoping to use this rig for some games in the future.
The average user is not only unaware that they need to re-install windows on a semi-annual basis, but furthermore, most wouldn't even know where to start. Are we not the most intelligent beings on the planet? Why do we subject ourselves to suffering from a device of our own creation?
I'm starting to get a flavour for wanderlust, to see if some sort of alternative to this pain can be found.
