Fuck me.
Last night I clicked on a suspect link in an email from someone I know. The email message was “Check this out:” and a link. I thought clicking a link would never hurt. It brought up a pharmaceutical web site and I shut the window not thinking anything more of it.
This morning I was greeted by a windows warning box (which might have been a pop-up window) saying I had infected files and that I should restart. I ignored it but found that I wasn’t able to run Firefox so I restarted.
Boom.
A virus scanner called “Think Point” greeted me after my login screen and it prompted me to scan my disk for errors. On the laptop I googled “Think Point” and found that it indeed was a virus. I followed steps to delete it (using malware programs) but in trying to fix it I got the blue screen of death and no matter what I tried the PC just never recovered from there.
I dropped the PC off at Jing’s shop and hopefully he can save my working files but I’ll definitely be losing all my applications, most likely all my email settings, browser bookmarks, FTP details etc… this is going to be a massive pain in the ass.
Thinking about moving back to Macs but a specced up iMac for $7k? You’ve got to be kidding me. My PC is 3yrs old and with it’s RAID hard drive set-up I think it’s faster than Christina’s brand new iMac! A new PC that would be even faster than my old one would cost $2k.
No-one to blame but myself really. I feel depressed. Haha. Awesome.
What anti virus program do you run? Anything remotely decent should have picked up and blocked a drive by virus install like the one you clicked through to. AVG is pretty good for home users. Was your windoze up to date? I thought microsoft had fixed most of the drive by installer bugs.
If you’re completely addicted to winblows you could run Ubuntu or something and install windows as a virtual machine. Would suck for games but should be fine for most other applications.
I wasn’t running any and have never had a virus in all 7-8 years of going PC. Vista has it’s own anti-virus thing but I’m not 100% sure my system was up to date. I assumed Vista updated itself.
I think this Think Point virus is pretty sneaky. Do some Google on it, looks like it’s gotten past a lot of anti-virus software out there. Most people have gotten rid of it without any hassles, where it all went wrong for me was when my PC crashed whilst trying to fix it.
I’d move back to Macs if they weren’t so expensive!
You have backups right? The mac vs PC thing is irrelevant when you lose work, settings and time fixing PC’s every month. My Macro is now 5 years old and still more power than i need. Original installation too :)
Then there s internet banking on a PC. Folk are nuts doing that with so many virus’s etc. As for anti-virus- its is great if it is updated to latest- but they don’t catch everything.
Why 7K anyway? A low end iMac will do the job just fine.
You could turn your PC into a hackintosh (google it) :-)
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I got a BSOD just recently too.. crap!
I tried ubuntu this yr too … And for everyday home stuff like surfing, email etc it’s fab. Next laptop I,ll get once my 5 yr old MacBook dies will be a cheap netbook + ubuntu.