Bill Strahm's Weblog

Monday October 25, 2004

How to screwup a weekend with a single executable
Ok, I admit it - I use Windows on my home machine because it is supposed to be easier (and frankly I like playing some of the "Windows only" games available for it.

Well last weekend I start looking and low and behold there is a few spyware/malware apps on my box (how do I know - because my personal firewall started asking if strange applications could access the internet - You MUST use a personal firewall, it is the only way of seeing some of these things). So time to go remove them.

To make a long story short - by the time I am done no networking works outside of PING, DHCP no, DNS nope... Don't even try anything fancier than that... Crap.

Well I have an almost functioning box after a long re-install - maybe it is finally time to make my default desktop a Unix variant and leave the Windows for only playing games...

Microsoft - Please fix your operating system such that I can baseline components - did I really want to reinstall the whole darned thing, no - just networking (grumble grumble grumble)

Oh yeah - I did try all of the repair options - nothing worked until the OS wipe. I guess that is pretty good it has been almost 2 years since the "LAST" time that happened, and it was a hardware problem then (Thank you Dell technical support that wouldn't talk to me until I had wiped my OS clean)
(2004-10-25 10:55:42.0) Permalink Comments [2]