Spyware Removal: Drop PC in Dumpster

morganx writes "The New York Times is reporting that some users prefer throwing out their PCs and buying new ones to actually removing their spyware. Does this mean lots of free hardware for the dumpster-divers among us?"

Comments

Cheaper?

[fembots]

I wonder why it is cheaper to buy a new $400 PC than paying top rate of, say $100 per machine, to get someone to insert the recovery CD and get everything back to factory defaults.

I find people disposing affected PCs highly irresponsible. Would someone think of those homeless children who dumpster-dived and brought home (or somewhere whatever) such PC? It's like throwing out old smoke alarm with perfectly good Uranium bits inside, someone's going to get hurt.

The friendly article mentioned that "people are increasingly unwilling to take out their 'software tweezers' to clean their machines", maybe it's time for manufacturers to install a HardReset button (like in a PDA) with a 1 GB ReadOnly Flash drive, which resets everything back to factory.

Re:Cheaper?

[inode_buddha]

And the *vast majority* of people using PC's will actually do any of the above, if they even RTFM that far. Corporate use is a different ballgame. Yeah, right. Most users I know can't be arsed to read the comic book about how to plug in a monitor. Posters are no good either. It should just "plug into a wall and just work". Well, they wanted to buy a toaster, and so they got sold on toasters. Too bad computers are a bit more complex that toasters, and of course the manufacturers and devels have no interest in changing this. Now, we have landfills full of toasters. Yeah, I'm *pissed* in case you haven't figured it out yet. After all, do you see people expecting to buy and use a car with zero training, no licence or maintenance? Why do they apply a different standard to computers?

Do the Slashdot editors read?

[cytoman]

I'm quite shocked to see so many dupes posted all the time. Do the editors scan the stories being posted, at all? They seem to be so unaware of what is already posted... the worst cases being dupes occuring on the same day (not this story).

Seriously, I think that given that Slashdot has become so big in terms of users, the editors need to be more serious about making sure dupes don't happen... if the editors are too busy, appoint a dupe editor who will catch the dupes before they are posted. All it requires is for the dupe editor to do a search on Slashdot to see if a story has already been posted...

Re:Dupe Removal

[qewl]

I'm completely convinced all the dupes and extended mysterious future posts(Not to mention increase paid subscriptions) are merely to increase page views and therefore site reloads to increase revenue. There's just no way the editors could post so many dupes within hours by mistake.

Re:Aside from the fact that this is a dupe

[einhverfr]

I have several customers who have migrated to Linux for similar reasons. They are all beginner consumers.

The problem largely is that tech support people treat consumers as idiots incapabile of learning the system. I usually start by explaining spyware, how it gets on your computer, how to avoid it/prevent it, etc. Then if it continues, I start suggesting Linux. I show them via a demo system how easy it is to use, and they are usually sold on the idea pretty quickly.

Computers aren't that hard to understand if we dispense with the tech talk and actually focus on communicating with the consumers.