More machine upgrade blues
I still haven’t quite finished by father-in-law’s computer upgrade. The problem with that machine is that it’s just old. I wrote about that before. However, that one’s pretty much in the bag.
As luck would have it, my neighbor dropped off two more machines this morning. The problem with these machines is spyware. Holy bleeping crap this crap is a problem.
I manage three PC’s at home and none of them have spyware… as far as I know. Even before I installed Microsoft’s AntiSpyware beta, there were only two or three pretty harmless offenders on these machines and they are long gone. I attribute the low crap-count mainly to my use of Firefox instead of IE, Windows XP service pack 2, and that I avoid shady programs like Kazaa (not sure if that’s even a download anymore) and others.
So, my kids are asleep and my wife is out on the town with her girlfriend so I thought I’d try and help out. My neighbor’s machines had over 80 spyware/malware programs on each machine and each machine was useless!
After a few hours or scans, safe mode command-line ninja work, the machines are still fucked. They are usable, but I get blue screens like this one on the soon-to-be reformatted laptop:
I got that when I was re-installing Windows XP SP2, which I’m re-installing since I suspect something is corrupted with their winlogon.exe or explorer.exe… or a DLL that one of these loads.
My gut tells me a pesky piece of malware senses it’s end is near and cleveryly brings down the machine to thwart my goals.