*SIGH*

[swestrup]

Well, the virus won. Once AGAIN I am going to spend the day formatting my C partition and reinstalling everything. You know, I take reasonable precautions and after the last virus attack, I seriously went out of my way to get decent virus protection on this machine.

Alas the viruses have gotten much more sophisticated in the last few years. It used to be trivial to kill one and root it out on the odd occasion when one managed to get past reasonable precautions. These days, even with a machine that is dilligently patched, a decent firewall and with two (or three) virus checkers running, they can get through and dig in to such an extent that you can't fix them.

You know, this might be enough to get me to upgrade to Windows Vista if I thought for one minute its virus protection was signifigantly better than XPs

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

How are you *getting* them? We haven't had a virus on the Toshiba since we got it ... Then again, I guess C. does test-run any random software he downloads on VirtualPC if he doesn't get it through SourceForge or something.

How frustrating. :/

[swestrup]

I don't know. I'm not doing anything more dangerous than I ever have. I suspect that its just a run of bad luck, or conversely, I've been unusually lucky up till now.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Oy, that really stinks.

[labyrinthman.livejournal.com]

Man, you've got the worst luck. I grab suspect and cracked software off of torrent sites and still don't have that kind of virus experience. So far, AVG's keep my system free of nastyness.

[swestrup]

I was running AVG at one point, but stopped using it for reasons I no longer remember. Maybe I'll give it another try.

[designergirl.livejournal.com]

I used to use AVG and scanned my computer regularly (no viruses detected) than one day I decided to try Avast! and it picked up 8 trojans that AVG didn't!

[pythonian.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of bad virus karma you've got. I feel for you. You mentioned a while back that your XP installer CD itself carried a trojan. How are you dealing with that? How did a trojan get on a certified Microsoft CD in the first place? That is one company that is usually quite anal about their OEM CDs.

As far as Vista goes, it is no panacea; you are quite correct to be suspicious. Even if you don't get a virus, it is still just as likely as the other Windows OSes to corrupt your antivirus apps all by its lonesome, thereby leaving you vulnerable to further attack. It happened to my work machine, necessitating a full wipe and reload.

Finally, would it be feasible to run a different OS and use Windows from within a virtual machine when required?

[swestrup]

Well, the only thing I really NEED windows for these days are:

1) Autocad - Its actually overkill for what I use it for (planning furniture rearrangements and work around the house) but all of the linux 'equivalents' I've tried have really sucked.

2) Wordperfect - By far my favorite word processor. I've been wondering if I should move over to Open Office, but I have hundreds of files in this format and it would take a lot of work to convert them. Besides Open Office's importer for Wordperfect files leaves much to be desired.

3) Games - This is the big one for me. I might be able to run many games under an virtualization layer, but I worry that frame rates and such would drop so much as to make them unplayable.

4) Software Development - I'm currently working on a cross-platform C++ library and one of my design goals is to have it usable on Windows. That means I need a windows development environment to try things out in. Worse yet, because Windows seems to be the lowest common denominator I've been doing all original development there (despite my preference for Linux tools for dev work) so as to ensure I don't end up relying on features that don't work right under Windows.

[kallisti.livejournal.com]

I would recommend looking at a tool called "clonezilla" which basically does what the ultra-expensive Norton Ghost Corporate does, but it's free. Basically, you can make an image of your system right after you get it all set up. So to get back to that same point after whatever it is is trashing your system, you just boot up a CD, and load the image off a bunch of DVDs, USB hard drive or other system on the network.

ttyl

[swestrup]

Thanks, I'll look into it.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

The only way I've ever been able to keep a Windows system running is to

(1) put a Linux system on the same hard drive,

(2) install Windows, using Linux to back it up occasionally while installing, in case the install crashes (you get a chance to do this every time it asks for a reboot)

(3) back it up again when it's running properly

(4) restore from that backup every few months when it fails.

But what I really do day-to-day is use Linux.

[swestrup]

Well, I'm afraid my experience with linux is that it just DOESN'T work.

I have something like a dozen live linux distros here. I went through every one of them today. NOT ONE manages to boot my desktop machine into the correct resolution. The Knoppixes all try to set a resolution higher than my monitor will go, and I don't see anything. The ubuntus all set a resolution like 800x600 or something, and refuse to let me try anything else. Oh, and most of their dialogues don't work in 800x600 resolution...

At least ZenWalk which boots me into 800x600 (although with a 1280x1024 desktop) allows me to manually go to 1280x1024, so that's what I'm using right now.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

I had that problem for a long time before the distros caught up with my hardware. In Knoppix, at least, you can force a certain resolution from the boot prompt.

[swestrup]

I've tried that in Knoppix, with all conceivable parameters. Its never worked.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

And yes, the viruses are more sophisticated now.