The last 3 weeks have been a nightmare ! A friend's computer has been "out of action" ; as far as Internet use, for that long
. As I haven't had the time to constantly monitor the situation a pretty simple infection has turned critical. The virus I initially cleaned, with Avast! 4.5 boot Scan ; Win32:Mopy[Wrm] + a security hole in Internet Explorer 6 on a WinXP system has dragged out to the point where my friend has spent a couple of 4 hour sessions with Microsoft support on the Telephone. The culprit: an 11 year old boy who turned of, probably accidentally, ???ZoneAlarm while downloading a game ROM. Once SP2 was mentioned, as it tried to download itself , again, they have been trying to fix the problem free of charge.
1. The person is not an advanced user; why should they be, it's just a home computer, for general use.
2. They took all the necessary precautions to safeguard their system, i.e. ZoneAlarm, SpyBot, Ad-Aware, SpywareBlaster, SpywareGuard, Avast!, Avast cleaner.
3.How can an average person be expected to have the skills to protect themselves from these malicious Spy/Malware attacks. I suppose the fact that a kid turned of the "protection", by disabling the Firewall, and downloading something he shouldn't is the bottom line. I'm not even sure if that's the case, it just seems the most likely.
Microsoft think it's a SP2 problem. They asked for a " Log " from ' Hijack this' ; ( which I installed ages ago if such a thing as this occured ) . I'm a Technician, but time is hard to find.
I wish they (mIcrosoft ) would get their act together as it's not fair for the general user to have to undergo the stress of going through all the troubleshooting involved to stabilise a "bad" system.
Sorry, I'm angry
Fingers crossed that Microsoft can sort out the problem today, Monday, Australian time.
Is the Personal Computer becoming a sad waste of time for the average user ?
And a huge artificial economy for the industry as a whole ?