The hell that is Windows

Some of you may have noticed our lack of postings over the last few days. Well, in short we're both incredibly busy.

I would be significantly less busy if I didn't have to deal with the constant barrage of spyware that has suddenly infested my workstation at CTV. Everything was just going peachy until this weekend when I noticed popups and popunders galore. I've been in meetings and on the road since Tuesday and so I hadn't touched my machine since then. Others have been using it. We're always short of machines. It seems that whoever used the workstation on Wednesday somehow managed to get around my plethora of anti-spyware and anti-viral devices and not only managed to infect the machine with copious amounts of spyware (fairly easy to do) but also managed to attract the attention of about twenty different viruses and worms to boot, including a warez bot. I know it happened on Wednesday at 2.52pm because that's when all the warez are dated from.

As anyone who has tried removing these suckers knows, it's not a simple matter of firing up latest versions of Nortons, McCaffee, Ad-Aware or Spybot S&D. These babies require a lot more work and that's what I've been doing since Saturday afternoon. Not just my workstation but all the ones at CTV because unless you do all of them it's pointless just doing the one. Mostly it's waiting around for 150 different scans to finish, but sometimes it requires to real fiddly work which ain't fun and fraught with peril. The real problem is that even with all the measures I've taken I suspect I've only managed to eradicate 80-90% of them. They're notoriously hard to find and destroy, because somehow M$ has managed to create a system so insecure that even someone using a non-administrator account can completely fuck up your machine.

That's why I'm a linux guy.