Backup

Over the past few months I’ve become much better at backing up the important stuff on my PC. Largely this is photos, music, any ripped DVDs and important House documents, license files and so on.

So, if my PC dies a death then at least I’ve got the important stuff backed up. The rest, the downloaded freebies, fonts, software and so on can be downloaded again and, in a way, it’s a chance to re-evaluate things.

Not that my PC is dying a death but it does, this very moment, have a virus. Not quite sure where it came from, as I’m very careful (having worked for an anti-virus company I remain somewhat paranoid about these things). All I know is that I was downloading an update to DirectX so I could have a go at Football Manager 2009 (a guilty pleasure if ever there was one), and as Microsoft downloads can be a bit flaky under Firefox, I fired up Internet Explorer (7) and kicked off the download.

Somewhere, somehow, I now have a virus. It’s proving a bugger to fix so I’m doing a little research to make sure I’ve got the right tools at my disposal. Such is the advantage of having a laptop. I can research the issue, download the right tools and fixes, dump them on a USB drive and I’m ready to tackle the virus.

It’s THIS kind of thing that just pisses me off. I don’t download illegal software, I virus check everything that I do download, even if it’s from a ‘safe’ source, and I have a good clean system which is checked for spyware, malware and viruses every 6-8 weeks. Then something like this happens and I just know I’ll spend a couple of hours fighting it.

That’s not why I have a computer. It’s not supposed to be a battle, it’s supposed to be a tool. Just like those arseholes who keep creating and releasing viruses. They’re a bunch of tools too.

Comments

  1. Which virus is it? I’ve acquired a Win32/Kryptik.DB trojan just recently, and although my virus-checker stops it from doing any harm it doesn’t seem to be able to get rid of it.

    I’m weighing up the pros and cons of finding the right removal info on the web with just reinstalling the whole OS from scratch (because I’ve been on the brink of doing that for a while now and this might be the final straw…)

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