poof

A friend running 98SE had horrible problems the last week or so. We would talk over the phone. I loaned them a usb memory key with the "blaster" remover and patch. Didn't have usb (disabled in Gateways BIOS, along with Plug n Play). Rats! I drove a considerable distance. Looked at the Gateway P3 750. Told them to bring it to work tomorrow and I would take it home.

I had to reinstall the OS (used Me, the only 98 disk I happen to have). Ran adaware 6, 86 hits (including Bonzai Buddie, she said her father told her it was cute). Ran Spybot, 27 more attacks, redirects, etc!

They thought Norton had them protected while they were on AOL. I explained viruses vs wormy trojan bombs and sold them on trying Zone Alarm.

They were completely unaware of the assholes out there.

I am not trying to sound smug. It just never struck me in a personal way that people are clueless as to what goes on with their computer(s).

I suppose tech help people could share much worse tales of woe.

Lasereth

My girlfriend is an ICC at her college, and she says that most of the people there have about 300+ apps on their PCs from Ad-Aware and at least 15 viruses. It really is pathetic how gullible the casual-user is on computers. Hell, my stepmom told me the other day that she opens every single e-mail she gets from Hotmail.

-Lasereth

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"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

sixate

I certainly hope you talked some sense into her...

Pragma

I've given up on trying to get my parents to practice safe computing, but at least a very long time ago when we had NetCom, they had Netscape as their default browser, and that's what my mom started using. She's dragged around a copy of Netscape 3.0 with her everywhere and refuses to upgrade, so I figure that's safer than a copy of OE6 that she never updates.

Of course, she runs Win95 *twitch* and never patches.

Now that I'm out on my own, it's a nice feeling not to have to continually help them with computer problems, though I do give them a call every time a new worm comes out to make sure that they aren't having issues.

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Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!

Sapper

It is a very sad state isn't it?

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rm -f /bin/laden

God of Thunder

It's worse at a business.

After we got hit with the blaster worm, we ended up going dept to dept - PC to PC and ran a virus scan on every PC along with Adaware and spybot.

The amount of things we found were amazing. Well, at least to management. The help desk people have known all along users were downloading Bonzi buddy (shudder), KaZaa, AIM, Weatherbug and more.

I had a few users ask me during this "Why do I get so much junk mail?" and then I do a scan to find 10 different ad programs, real player and two messengers.

I look at it this way; stupid users=job security.

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I reject your reality, and substitute my own

-- Adam Savage

rubicon

I push Windows 2000 or XP for all of my customers. I utilize Group Policy to enforce safer Windows settings and take away any sort of user rights above a normal User.

This doesn't help in every case but will catch a lot up front.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

viejo gringo

Got two emails from someone on the local school web
site.....both had a virus in them...

So, I took the info over to the school and showed the
staff there what was happening.

I told them if they had their virus checkers updated this would not happen....."HAVE OUR WHAT?????" where have these people been??.

I really did not get their attention until I told them that a virus
could wipe out their computer---and yes that includes all of
their grades that are in there...

Had a lot of people writeing down AVG.com... once they found
out it was free.

MontanaXVI

yes i agree it is quite sad im not mr tech guy but id say im a bit more than a novice user you would be amazed how much people at work ask me how to fix and deal with "stupid" issues. I try and tell everyone who wants a new 'puter to know what you are buying do not just go get one to have one make sure you know what is going on when you get it. Also the ones i love are the guys who just sit on the dock in the wide open under the security cams etc and just pass around disks and movies like it is legal. Now mind you a retail store's security persons are not looking for warez but i mean come on people use some common sense when you do stuff.

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Spank you very much

split lickety

hmm can't find anything @ AVG.com. any help here?

GreasyP

It's actually this page right here. You can download a free, slightly limited version of AVG for personal home use. It's a good program, and updates come out all the time. Set it to automatically download the updates every week if you have an always-on internet connection.

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heyal256

It's not at avg.com but the program is called avg antivirus from grisoft.com.
here is the link to download the free version
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php

split lickety

thanks to both of you. 5 mins. damn what a great forum.

MovieNut

What's an ICC?