Light Posting
Yeah, I know it's been really, really quiet here today - even more so than the past couple of weeks. But there really is a good reason.
They are called "rootkits" and the kids got them onto almost the entire home network. I have completely stripped the drive on one computer so far, zeroed it (DOD standards) and reinstalled the operating system and all the other software. (And boy, does it run better). The second one is being nuked as I write this. Running a boot and nuke takes forever with big drives. Reinstalling everything and updateing all the drivers takes even more time. And worse yet, if this doesn't fix it, I may have to replace hard drives entirely. (Strict quarantine of the reborn computer from the network and I'll repeat this on each computer one by one.) Argh.
I hate computers right now. So posting is a chore.
Geek Stuff | Gaius Sunday, 4 March , 2007
By BubbaB, Monday, 5 March , 2007 @ 6:07 pm
So, what the heck did your kids install?
By Gaius, Monday, 5 March , 2007 @ 6:36 pm
Dunno. It was in the system root and the instructions for identifying and removing it were considerably more involved than just zeroing the drive and starting from scratch. I did lose some nice pictures. As did my daughter. (She’s mad at me about that - but she is the one who installed the IM programs and game downloads that ate the computer, so we’re even!)
By BubbaB, Tuesday, 6 March , 2007 @ 11:29 am
You sure it wasn’t a CD from Sony? :^)
I have to be a little careful with my wife. I make sure she doesn’t download anything without telling me. We have downloaded something we thought was legitimate, and Norton quarantined it.
Sometimes, I think it’s a good idea to reinstall everything on a system, anyway…