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Phew! I didn't blog yesterday, 'cos my computer got infected by adware. What the heck. I've used computers for 6 years (I think) without any problem- no viruses, no adware. Ok, the hard drive crashed one time, but that was 'cos it was old, there weren't any viruses. Of course, this computer I'm using isn't the desktop at home. It's the laptop. No firewall. My desktop's still fine. Maybe I should get one now.
Anyway, yesterday morning, I turned on the laptop, and started browsing my usual sites, while leaving BitComet on to download stuff. I vaguely remember absent-mindedly closing one or two popups... Then after a while I realised that the popups kept... popping up. Then a shortcut to some site suddenly appeared on my desktop (the computer 'desktop', not my other com). I deleted that. And suddenly not only were there popups in my browser, some of them actually opened ontheir own! That meant that I had some adware on my computer. The onslaught of popups had begun. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a little. But it was frustrating.
I tried Ad-aware. It sucks. After doing a "full system scan", and "deleting" the adware, the popups still kept coming. I tried the free Norton antivirus that came with the laptop. Didn't work either. Dammit. I tried all sorts of stuff- manually deleting anything that seemed like crap, and trying to block access to ad servers. All didn't work.
What really bugged me was that I don't remember doing anything out of the ordinary that morning. I just visited my usual sites and started BitComet. How did adware get in? Aargh.
So I kept trying to stop the popups, until late evening. Then I had a brainwave- Restore the computer. Reformat. Wipe out everything. That meant I had to back up all my stuff. Used a total of 14 CDs and 1 DVD. I used CDs 'cos I didn't want to waste my DVDs. I have tons of blank CDs. But then I got tired of burning the CDs, so I ended up using one DVD.
Anyway, luckily for me, IBM has some pretty nifty restore thingy. I used to not only reformat the hard disk, but to restore it back to what it was when I first got it. So that means those preinstalled programs were still around.
Phew. I started putting all my stuff back onto this computer from morning until just a while ago. So far no popups. There'd better not be anymore.
Ok, I'm gonna get a firewall.
hyperxi's life @
11/05/2005 02:35:00 pm
