It’s just data

Retro Virus

Randall Munroe: HAHA, CLEANING VIRUSES?  MAN, WHAT A BLAST FROM THE PAST!

How timely.  Within the past week, both my sister-in-law and my wife’s netbooks got hit by viruses.  I spent yesterday wiping and reinstalling my wife’s machine.  While many of the details have changed, the overall process was very familiar: install Ubuntu to a USB drive, boot Ubuntu, rsync all of the files off the machine, reset to factory settings, install numerous updates, install a virus scanner, install firefox, thunderbird, pidgin, and printer drivers; copy over profiles and settings, and the data files that were on her Desktop.

Since my sister-in-law is three hours away, and only uses her netbook for the net, she may get upgraded to Ubuntu.  Particularly as I don’t know if it is possible to restore the original Windows install on an EEE 900A (mine came win Xandros, long since replaced first by Easy Peasy then by Ubuntu NetBook Remix).

As for my wife: various upgrades may be in her future too.

Performance tuning knobs: telling Microsoft Security Essentials not to scan Thunderbird; GlodaQuilla provides fine grained control over indexing; Gloda indexing can be disabled entirely.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

Evolution of Tinkering

Jim Stogdill:  How many people out here have changed an alternator?  (I have, twice) Replaced spark plugs (ditto, several times) or spark plug wires? (once).  Not to mention batteries and other parts.  As a teenager in the... [more]

Trackback from Sam Ruby

at

I recently scanned 9 of my old drives going back 6 years and my 4 current drives. Microsoft Security Essentials found next to nothing. It rarely finds anything on my current drives.

NOD32 & Cobra found more on ONE of my current drives than Microsoft Security Essentials found on ALL 13!

Either those 2 products have problems with false positives or Microsoft Security Essentials is borderline useless.

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