Back to Life, Safe and Sound
Installed another anti-virus today, the fourth. The behavior of my poor Windows box has come out of control lately. At first, it was quite subtle, and the computer obeyed my orders. Reluctantly though, but still my actions meant something. Suddenly things started to worsen dramatically. Soon I ended up with the couple of nice blue screens, followed by minor data losses.
None of the installed anti-virus packages, I run at least twice a week, showed any signs of malware, except for the usual handful of tracking cookies in my browser. It’s quite irritating when you feel having absolutely no control of your own computer: the network indicators blink, the hard drive crunches like crazy, the memory is full of … and to complete the picture you are totally abandoned desperately clicking and pressing all alone. It lives its own life and I quite happy for it, but to tell the truth, my plans are a little bit… different.
After a quick lunch I decided to take a moment to run all of the checkers once again. When all of them reported a green light, I took it all in my hands: opened the processes list and started identifying what’s running module by module until several suspicious processes were spotted and recorded. Then Goodling their names, I learned they really were Trojan downloaders what perfectly explained the naughtiness of the box.
Information of this sort is usually provided by the producers or malware removers and in this case it was Prevx1 who seemed to know a lot about my troubles. I will put it shortly. It found and removed about 10 severe problems, and passed the control over the computer back to me. Phew, now I feel at home again.
Psshh… It’s watching you reading from my system tray.
October 20th, 2006 at 11:33
I’ve tried PrevX today and have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it looks like a professionally developed product that does its job well, but on the other hand I feel the lack of control over its functionality. Most likely it was originally designed for unexperienced users with easy-to-use paradigm in mind. Anyway, it tested my both work and home computers and reported green light each time
It was a good test for my current antivirus - AVG, that is free for non-commercial use and has more advanced configuration system.
October 20th, 2006 at 14:02
The lack of control? Have you checked the preferences? There are three modes: ABC, Pro and Expert.
I also run AVG with all the latest updates. It was on the list of these existing checkers I tried before installing Prevx1, and unfortunately it didn’t find ~10-14 problems I cured with Prevx1. I would say you are lucky (or at least more lucky than me) to have a clear system.