2005/07/22 Sick of Windows yet?

Thursday night my wife complained that her computer was slow starting up, applications took too long to load, and it would hang for several minutes when trying to shut down.

You can probably imagine how thrilled I was.

She shouldn't have become infected by a virus. I keep her machine up to date with Windows updates, run several levels of anti-virus software and keep anti-spyware software running too. Beyond that, my wife isn't stupid, won't even click on a link I send her without questioning it, uses Firefox, and is very careful and conscientous. Yet.. somehow a nasty little worm got through. It was easy enought to find: I saw a "wmsvc.exe" running in the process manager, looked it up on the web, and was able to remove it easily enough. Potentially, this boopy can be a key logger, but we don't think she accessed our bank accounts or anything else important during the time she was infected. If this was monitoring keystrokes, all they got was mundane family email talking about flowers and new furniture. We will change passwords and be extra vigilant for a few months just in case, but the exposure period was very brief at worst. Really, I should wipe the whole box clean and reinstall it.. I guess I'll have to do that to be safe.

I'm really sick of Windows. Yeah, yeah, I've heard the nonsense about "if Linux and Macs were as popular as Windows, they'd be plagued by viruses and worms too". Yeah, right. Well, even if true (and I doubt it), it doesn't matter: right now I can run a Mac and not have to worry about being under constant threat of damage. The only applications my wife runs are QuickBooks and Microsoft Office; QuickBooks has a Mac version and Microsoft Office can be easily replaced.

I just have to talk her into it. Her previous experience with my iBook left her less than enamored of all things Apple, so that's not as easy as it sounds. If she didn't have a convenient and cost-free geek to call upon for her Windows troubles, converting her might be easier. After all, she was comfortably watching TV while I expunged her registry of this nast little invasion. If she had to do that herself, or pay someone for such services, I could probably have her happlily on OS X already.

Oh well. I'll be buying a new Mac when the Intel versions come out; maybe by then I can sway her enough to double up on that purchase. Until then, I'm sure I'll be running regedit every now and then as required.

See http://lobby4linux.com/WordPress/?p=26 also.

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