Real World Computing
Hard to get
I decided to attack the machine by hand. I wished I'd had a copy of Norton Save and Restore 2 with me, along with an external USB hard disk (I've now placed those items in my car in case of any repeat). It would be nice to snapshot a machine like this and drop the contents into a locked-down virtual machine for subsequent evaluation. Also, since any clean-up was going to involve deep brain surgery from which the computer might not awaken, a ghost image would have been some reassurance.
I decided to clean up as much as possible by uninstalling anything remotely dodgy from Add/Remove programs, and then I removed the AV package, as it clearly wasn't doing the job. Then I started attacking the box using a variety of downloaded AV and antispyware tools. Fortunately, I've current serial numbers for just about everything, so after some reboots and significant holding of breath it appeared the machine was back to normal - until I did some web browsing and was hit by advert pop-up websites yet again. I went through five top-selling name-brand packages in turn, each of which claimed the machine was now clean when it clearly wasn't, and its performance still sucked.
Finally, in desperation I went to the Microsoft security website and ran its online tool, which proclaimed the computer to be clean. Not satisfied, I did the download and installation for the 60-day free trial of OneCare. During the setup process, it does a system scan. This pointed out a bunch of problems on this machine. It updated itself, cleaned out these problems and, after a reboot, the machine sprang back to normal life. I did some more reboots and everything stayed stable. Since then the machine has been running fine.
What does this prove? Well it's only a sample size of one, on a bunch of nasties that may not be around in a few weeks' or even months' time. So it doesn't really add up to a whole hill of beans, and that's one of the trueisms of the anti-virus world: what's right today might not be right tomorrow, and a toolkit that you swear by today might be one you swear at tomorrow. Still, I can't deny that on this machine, in this office, on this occasion, OneCare came up trumps where others failed. If only for that reason OneCare deserves consideration.
