Sunday, March 01, 2009

And I have to thank...

... Microsoft, Netgear and Symantec, any or all of whom have conspired to force me to waste *the entire day* today searching for a trojan infection I don't actually have.

I've been suffering blue screens (Wikipedia if you don't know what this is) for weeks now, either in the Netgear Wireless driver, or the Symantec Intrusion Detection System driver. That, coupled with appalling performance, led me to suspect some sort of infection lurking on my PC somewhere, even though it sits behind a firewalled router, also runs Norton Smart Firewall, has always had anti-virus protection, and never goes anywhere near any dodgy websites.

My suspicions were heightened by Internet research suggesting that the market leaders McAfee (which I used until January) and Norton (which I'm using now) only provide protection against 23% of the threats "out there." WHAT?? Forty quid a year to be protected against ONE IN FOUR viruses, trojans, etc?? As if that wasn't bad enough, Googling the driver name and "blue screen" came up with links to several forums suggesting the worst had happened.

Sooo... I cleaned out all the unnecessary processes that run, removed a load of unwanted software, ran a deep scan of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (that took 3 hours and found nothing more serious than a few tracking cookies) followed by Kaspersky's online scanner (that took 30 minutes to download all its updates and a further 5 hours to scan the whole machine and found nothing more serious than the odd phishing email in an old archived copy of my PST file).

All in all, as I said above, I've done almost nothing today apart from this crap, and it found nothing. Nothing! I supposed I should be glad there wasn't any keystroke grabbing goblin lurking under my keyboard learning all my online banking passwords and wotnot, but really. What a pisser.

To cap it all I then found another solution to one of the BSODs in another forum. Verify your drivers, it said, and all will be well. So I have. And now I wait with bated breath to see if I get another blue screen. Bloody computers. I think I'll go back to more traditional pastimes. Right now knitting sounds attractive.

4 comments:

Gloria Horsehound said...

Horrible!

Don said...

There is a permanent solution to blue screens, John, but you already know it. He he.
Seriously, though, a couple of our MS computers at work got caught out with some weird malware, and after installing Super Anti Spyware free edition, they smartened right up. It was amazing the stuff it found too.

Digger said...

Thanks for the heads-up on Super Anti-Spyware Don. I ran it this morning. All it found was a bunch of tracking cookies (again), so I'm fairly confident I'm clean. The poor performance may be down to Windows being clogged with temp files and other gubbins. I found over 5,000 links in the "Recent Files" folder, for instance. Annie recommends rebuilding Windows annually and I've had this machine more than 4 years and never rebuilt it, so maybe it's time.

Don said...

Actually, that's what I do with Linux as well. I save to dvd or cd everything that's important to me, then completely install a new version. Then I put back all my favourite stuff. I used to try saving my /home folder but I found there were some inconsistencies, and things worked better when everything was renewed.