Posted by cwdjrxyz on 07/12/07 01:08

On Jul 11, 3:11 pm, Adrienne Boswell <arb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have a good friend who asked me to come out and take a look at her
> daughter's computer because it was really slow. Spybot Search and Destroy
> came up with 1,401 malware programs and/or tracking cookies. The anti-
> virus came up with 89 viruses and trojans. I got everything cleaned up,
> installed a Hosts manager, Firefox and Opera (default). Then I told them
> that IE was off limits.
>
> Three days to fix this. Scarey.


To many, a computer is now just another home appliance. It is expected
to work properly as delivered. Many do not know much about how it
works and do not care to know. A new major brand name computer usually
comes with some sort of trial virus protection these days. However
many likely do not pay for it after the trial period ends. In a few
years the computer then often becomes very slow and those, who do not
have a friend such as you, assume it is worn out or outmoded and buy a
new computer. If you have to hire someone to spend the required time
to evict all of the bugs, you often would pay about as much as many
used PCs are worth. However the hackers have become better and more
numerous in recent years, and the computer gets infected and slows
down much faster than often was the case in the past. Many would balk
at replacing a computer only 1 or 2 years old. This may force some
people to reconsider how they use a computer and paying for virus
protection software. Actually there is free virus protection software
that works fairly well. Some of the broadband isps are now pushing and
providing such software. For example ATT/Yahoo DHL does and makes
users of their service aware of it from time to time. Also Yahoo Mail
has fairly good virus scan software included in their free e-mail
service, and they scan all attachments before opening. This likely
prevents many virus and other problems from getting downloaded to less-
than-careful computer owners.

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