Who is the computer guru?
Yesterday, after posting my last message here, I suddenly found myself under the attack of evil forces, that thought, although this is likely to be the oldest computer in the Western world, this was a comfortable place for making some noise.
I like this computer and using it makes me feel proud. It's like an old sport car (like a Jaguar from the Sixties): any one can drive a brand new Mercedes S-class, just a few can live an old convertable, every day, sun, rain or snow.
In order to do it, the machine has to be treated gently and you must know it quite well.
As I said, despite having 64MB of RAM and Pentium III 450MHz, XP works very well: with my DSL connection, I can check the forums on chemicalforums.com, use messenger and listen to one of my MP3s with media player (10th edition, baby!).
There are certainly a few drawbacks: for example, I can't install a recent, decent, anti virus. What I will use, from now on, to protect this old fellow is a free firewall (XP has one, but I wouldn't rely on it too much).
I have to say that, once graduated (2 years), my family (yes, all of them, not only my parents: we are Italian, we are not very rich) will buy me a laptop, since I want to go abroad for a PhD. But this is a different story.
So, yesterday, I was hit by, above all, an enormous number of ad-wares.
I managed (fighting my way through windows constantly popping up) to download a free trial version of Panda Antivirus 2007, install it and run it. A high number of viruses and ad-wares was found. But, as I discovered, the most vicious of them survived.
I tried the Active Scan (over night, I went to bed at 2am), which, finally, wiped out the viruses (that had increased in number, meanwhile) but can't remove ad/spy-wares: it only tells you where and how many they are.
This morning (woke up at 7) I was really disappointed: before going to the University I tried to manually delete all the files, but couldn't find all of them (c'mon, I didn't have enough time).
However, once at the university, I explained to my friends my problem: they had two different opinions (namely, Ad-Aware and Avast!).
I said that I would have entitled computing guru one of them, according to the outcome.
Well, thing is I opted for a third solution: I reinstalled the free trial but, this time, I updated its files first.
And, this time, it was all nice and smooth! 15 ad-wares detected and destroyed!
Oh, yes, I'm so proud of my old-fashioned sport coupé!
By the way, after a promising start, Chemblogs, now, looks like an abandoned building, with three or four people living in. It reminds me the final, well-known, scene of Blade Runner.
I hope Mitch will NOT think about shutting everything down: I really like writing a blog.
A nice car you have!