This year has been remarkably free from the usual tech support calls on my parents’ and in-laws’ computers. Not sure why — no specific complaints, perhaps. I did run through an update of AdAware and Spybot S&D on the Ks’ machine, but haven’t installed Spyware Blaster yet. Should probably do the same with the ‘rents’ computer as well, if I get back back over there for any length of time this trip.
Which was all called to mind by this article:
Went home for the holidays this week, and of course, the annual fix-Mom’s-computer event. This year things on my mother-in-law’s Windows 98 PC were especially bad; it could’ve been used as a software showcase of the latest and greatest in malware.
For future reference, here’s a laundry list of steps I took to get Mom’s computer working and secured from evil software.
It’s a pretty reasonable list. I might argue over some of the specifics (my last few experiences with ZoneAlarm on an XP machine were not pretty), but it’s a good conceptual laundry list, at least, to look over.
I did like this anecdote in the AdAware section:
True story: my mother-in-law heard a Barenaked Ladies song on the radio that she liked, so she Googled “bare naked ladies.” …
Clicking, and massive malware infection, ensue. (It’s rather ironic that both the real-life and virtual sex industries lead to massive infections …)
(via J-Walk)
A good list.
I’ll need it for my parents as well.
Odd…ZoneAlarm runs like a champ on my XP laptop. Much better the the MicroShaft firewall that keeps trying to supercede it.
On both our home machine and on the Ks, ZA started getting into this endless memory-sucking cycle. At the time, info on various boards indicated it was a known problem. It may very well have been corrected since (this is a year or two in the past).