Re: [Thinkpad] Glacial A30

Save the important data, and reinstall Windows after via
a reformat.

The malware situation is SO BAD that no tool can reliably
fix everything. My boss's machine had gotten some stuff
on it that Symantec, Spybot and Adware were able to clean,
mostly, but there was one process which generated tons of
mail files in the windows temp dir, kind of like a fish
flopping around out of water. I declared war on it and
finally found and killed it--it was a boot sector viri
which *nothing* had found, and this was running on the
machine for a month before I killed it.

It took me 39 hours to do this, plus a lot more reading
about boot sector viri and related subjects. The amount
of time I spent on it was insane.

The simple and sad fact of the matter is that there are
something around one million peices of malware out,
according to Symantec. I'd thought the number was closer
to 400,000 but I think I trust Symantec to know how
many they've found over the years.

Given this situation, I have come to the conclusion that
the only way to keep Windows sheep at all safe is to
install the OS and patch in a known safe environment,
install NOD32 with the "threat sense" stuff, and give
that to the user. Having the best tools installed on
a machine BEFORE anything crawls inside Windows is the
only way to be safe.

Ellis, your case fits exactly with what I'm seeing.
Tools can scrape away at 90%+ of the things out there,
but not all. You'll never be completely clean unless
you spend absurd amounts of time on it, working by hand.

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will not be
binary compatible with previous versions. If this is
true that will be a major step in the right direction.

Anyway, sorry for the length, but the Windows situation
is bad enough that rebuilding systems from scratch is
really the right thing to do.

 --STeve Andre'

Ellis Weiner writes:

> I finally repossessed the A30 I had given to my daughter. It was
> running--if that's the word--as though sedated on Thorazine. So I took
> it to the local Data Doctors. The guy removed a lot of extraneous
> programs and did whatever he did. Twice I asked them if it would help
> to boost
> the RAM and twice they said, Not really.
>
> It's down to 49 processes, which he says is closer to optimal. Fine.
>
> It's STILL insanely slow. It takes five minutes (literally) to boot up
> and another five, at least, to launch Word. And this is when it's
> offline and not even
> connected to the Net.
>
> I installed Spybot and caught 25 spywares. Nonetheless...
>
> It's got a Pentium 3 and has 256 MB RAM. Of that, 41.48 is "Available
> memory" with a total virtual memory of 2 GB. The HD is 30 gigs
> with about half newly cleaned out and available.
>
> What gives? Should I indeed get more RAM? All I want to do is run Word
> and some basic email and Firefox stuff. I swear. I love the hi-rez
> screen, which
> is still perfect.
>
> TIA with thanks, in advance.
>
> Ellis
>
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Received on Wed Apr 9 12:49:47 2008