The thing is, I’ve read all of the articles about viruses, worms, adware and so on (and I’ve had my browser redirected a few times) but you never really think the worst will happen to you.Today I spent 5 hours trying to fix my daughters PC, which has become seriously infected in the very brief time that she’s been connected to BT broadband. It was connected for an hour or two, to be precise. By the time I got there, she had 35 different spyware/adware variants on there (identified using Micrsoft’s new utility) which I was delighted to be able to remove. Unfortunately, the most determined reintroduced themselves every time I reconnected to the internet. I was almost literally pulling my hair out, (Fortunately, she was out of the house at the time, so didn’t have to listen to my bad language.) I wanted to install Service Pack 2, but couldn’t get enough bandwidth because the connection was saturated by … something or other. So I decided to go for a Norton AV installation instead (yes, I know not having a firewall or av software is asking for trouble, but how many people do you think are in this situation, despite the warnings?). I eventually managed to get that installed after a plate-spinning act, killing off alien-looking processes in Task Manager ….Of course, as soon as it was enabled, it threw 4 viruses in the first 30 files it inspected, at which point I threw in the towel until tomorrow.
Trust me, folks, it’s a horrible, horrible experience that doesn’t just happen in PC magazine articles and just because it hasn’t happened to you yet … Give in. Give Symantec their �40, because today isn’t something I ever want to go through again!