Taking a break from Microsoft Malware Hell
Yesterday morning I made a coffee and ambled into the study (read: junk room) to catch up on the social networks, and noticed an icon had changed in the start bar at the foot of the screen. “That's interesting”, I thought, and hovered the mouse over the new icon. It offered no context menu to remove it. Alarm bells started ringing gently in the darker corners of my paranoid mind. After a quick check through “Add/Remove Programs” I spotted a toolbar add on that I had not installed, and that would not remove itself. The alarm bells became much, much louder.
Four hours later I had replaced the largely useless (but free) “Microsoft Essentials” antivirus with something better, and run a full scan of the computer. Sixty or seventy suspect “items” were found (files, registry entries, and so on), and the antivirus software reported a clean bill of health Except the entries were still there in Program Files. A run through Regedit by hand removed them, and I set about burning an Ubuntu Linux DVD.
You see if you have been involved with computers for long enough, you pretty much know that if malware gets into your computer (and antivirus software is about much use as a chocolate teapot), your only real option is to format the machine, and start again. You can never really trust it again until you do so.
I took the half-way measureeven though all traces of the offending malware have ostensibly been cleansed from the system, I found myself thinking “enough is enough”, and went ahead with the Ubuntu Linux installpartitioning the computer to dual boot into Windows, or Linux. It's worth noting that this old desktop PC had Linux on it for a couple of years in the pastWindows has been a relatively new thing, purely because I had a license available for it.
In all honesty, the only thing I will really miss from Windows is Kerbal Space Program (a very silly game where you build rockets, and waste hours flying them around a pretend solar system with varying degrees of success). It is available for Linux, but I'm inclined to keep away from it on purposelike I saidit eats hours of time you might otherwise have spent doing far more useful things, like reading Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit.