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Worst Security Clean-Up You've Performed?
nakhla writes "Last night, I was tasked (by my wife) to help fix her friend's computer. It is a Windows XP home system which has been running slowly, almost to the point of un-usability (like *that's* never happened before). It turns out that hundreds of random processes had filled up its meager 256 MB of RAM. The cause? Nearly 7,500 viruses and worms that had infected the system. That number doesn't even include the hundreds of spyware and adware programs that had installed themselves, as well. Although the box is now behind a firewall, that wasn't always the case. This was, by far, the most infected system I'd ever seen, but I'm sure it can't be the worst ever. What was the worst security cleanup you ever had to perform?"
Once, I saw a computer infected with Windows ME.
Demented But Determined.
I used to keep the case off of my computer, to help keep it cool. That is, until a friend crashed in my study after a big night out and somehow managed to throw up inside it. Needless to say I have a whole new setup now.
Buh!
I once tried to uninstall Real Player, but I was not successful so I guess it does not count.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
This is from 2005! Her computer was a PII 75 running Windows 95. The basic problem is that it had been overrun by viruses. A one hour fix if I had taken out her hard drive, plunked it into my repair PC and done a virus scan... but she refused to allow her machine out of her house for fear that I would steal it. Rather than entrust her $50 PC to me, she instead payed me $280 in house-call fees while I sat there for 8 hours with my arms crossed, watching AVG do it's stuff.
Congress. Got that bitch all cleaned up. Sure took a while, though. You wouldn't _believe_ the shit that was going on in there!
At the university I once had the job to produce 100 copies of a circa 100 page application document for a very important government funded research project.
I had a high-performance copier, to which I fed the original pages, cranked the lever to 100 copies and kept shoveling paper into it until it finished.
Only then I realized that I misunderstood the sort/collate switch and ended up with 10,000 sorted pages, meaning that 100 pages #1 were followed by 100 pages #2 etc.
I was out of fresh paper for a retry, too.
After some decent swearing and a couple of cigarettes, I arranged the tables of a seminar room around myself, then spent the whole night making 100 stacks of paper one by one.
When it was over, the skin on my fingers was so dry that it cracked and started bleeding. Not to speak of the over-exercised muscles in my hands...
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
About twenty years ago an exterminator was spraying my apartment complex and asked if I had seen any bugs. I replied, "Only in the computer." Sadly, he actually sprayed inside the computer and killed it. I've since learned to curb the computer humor with non-technical people.
Someone sent me a floppy with the WDEF B virus on it, but my Mac IIci's antivirus software caught it. Of course, since those days Apple have really got their act together and I don't get viruses nearly as often.
My PC is virus-free too, probably because it doesn't have a network card or modem, a surprisingly difficult combination to achieve when buying it. I gave up trying to spec a machine without ethernet and settled for opening up a brand new computer, pulling the unwanted card and binning it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
This isn't precisely what you're talking about but...a son should never have to clean up his mom's computer. Or if you do, for the love of god, DON'T BROWSE THROUGH THE TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES.
Just wipe it. Trust me (shudder), a boy should never see that side of his mom.
That was no doubt the worst cleanup I ever had to do.
-Styopa
I remember one time I listened to an outgoing MS VP, and refused to let my son install antivirus software on his new Vista machine...
3dMark scores seem irrelevant when you throw out a number like that. Yikes.
P.S.: Anyone else see the humor in that this "Ask Slashdot" was posted right after the "Vista doesn't need Anti-virus" story?
...I'm just sayin'
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower