This Pains Me
It is actually painful to write this post. After all my fun with Microsoft lately, after all the unpleasant things I have said about them, after all the new and interesting word combinations I have come up with in the Crabitat while fighting computers, I have to thank them. That's right, I have to thank Microsoft. Really. They have put a live scanner online called Windows Live OneCare where their software will scan your computer and fix a lot of problems.
For free.
The scanner found and killed the trojan that the kids got on one computer and the registry tool found and corrected a bunch (a very large bunch) of registry errors that other registry tools had missed completely. All of the Crabitat's Windows computers have now been scanned. And they are running perfectly, even the one the kids nearly killed. And I did not have to strip and reinstall the operating system (which takes the better part of a day, I've found). Give it a try if you're running a Windows computer. (I dunno if it works with anything but Windows XP since that is all I am running at the moment.)
Geek Stuff | Gaius Monday, 12 March , 2007
By Neo, Monday, 12 March , 2007 @ 3:52 pm
I was all fired up on this product till it found a Trojan in my wife’s Netscape Inbox and quarantined all 1.1 Gb of it, with the message “1 Trojan found, removed”, no mention of the filename or directory.
I also wasn’t so happy with the restore utility that lets you restore all, only the “missing” or individual files, but has a non-resizeable window that is so small that it doesn’t hold the whole path so you can’t ever see the whole filename.
Bill if your reading, how about a whole directory restore, including subdirectories.
By skh.pcola, Monday, 12 March , 2007 @ 7:51 pm
The scanners won’t work within Opera, so I’ll forego any positive returns from running their software. MS IE7 is STILL the slowest piece-of-crud browser available.
By Gaius, Monday, 12 March , 2007 @ 8:11 pm
Never tried Opera. Might have to just to see if it works. But the OneCare does work on problem computers. It recovered my youngest girl’s computer just when I was pretty sure I’d have to gut it - or go to Linux for her. (Still might do that, anyway. I am tired of the spyware/spam/trojans/adware/etc.)
By Bleepless, Tuesday, 13 March , 2007 @ 4:01 pm
It is free only for the first 90 days. Will they tell you when the time is getting short or just let you glide into the paying area? I am not going to ask.