WOO, I now have comments!!! I had to update my blogger template to allow it though. I liked my old style, it was basic and not like other people's, but oh well. Hopefully everything is still working!!!

Also, I know that my comments section does not work, I'm going to fix that. And I will be trying to update this more often. Lots can happen in 6 months.

Oh Good Ole' Computer Fun!!!

Soooo.... what does images.traffic.cmp.com or Optimizer or Hpotdd01 or Rundll32 etc, etc, mean to you?

Up till last month sometime, they meant nothing to me, except for exasperating me to the point of tearing out all my hair as I would sit and surf the net with pop-ups shooting up all around me like some sort of horrific curse.

Now, those I listed are nothing compared to my friend Brad's computer. When I go to Army Guard drills I fix his computer, because invariably someone will have downloaded some auto dialer or computer porn/gambling shit onto his computer via Kazza or Morpheus, and by the time I get to it (once a month) he can hardly even surf the web.

This time was especially bad. I tried to upload Windows XP upon his Gateway computer a few months back to replace the XP that was already there, but what I didn't realize is that if you do that without using the 'Gateway Restoration Disk' you simply upload another copy of the same operating system, leaving the old one there to have to choose from when doing a reboot, and severely limiting system resources by wasting a lot of space on the hard drive.

So, I called Gateway up to find out how I can wipe off the hard drive leaving it in it's empty virgin state, ready for uploading of the operating system, drivers, software, etc. This is when I found out that Gateway outsources it's technical support to India. No, not Indiana folks, but actually way the fucking way around the world India. I couldn't understand anything the guy was saying, except for one thing:

According to this putz, Gateway computers do not come with the 2 restoration cds that a person needs to reload the XP onto their computer, you have 15 days from purchase to get them for free, after that they are 'not responsible' for your lack of the discs and you have to purchase them for 35 dollars. Needless to say I had some choice words, some of which spewed out as I tried to make this person of Taj Mahal persuasion understand the complete lunacy of having software discs with your computer but being unable to reload the majority of them because of the lack of the 'incredibly user friendly' restoration cds.

Not only that, but when I tried to get more help from him, he informed me that because the computer was more than 2 years old, it was out of warranty, and that he could no longer talk to me unless I was willing to pay 2.99 a minute for customer service and support. At this point, I wanted to fly to India and shoot this guy, and anyone else who would ever think up something so incredibly stupid as this. So anyways, I never did get the other operating system off his computer.

I ended up jotting down a lot of notes, every time I would see a popup 'popup', I wrote down the first address that showed up in the window title, usually a quick flash of the company that created the adware, and looked at properties, then used Yahoo and AskJeeves to find forums that talked about that specific problem. I ran an adware finder and it found more than 280 different files, cookies, and folders that are known virues of one sort or another. WOAH!!! I was able to remove most of what I found, at least to the point that he can use his computer without pop ups.

I learned so much, a self taught still newbie software tweaker am I. I am now able to use 'run' to do a 'msconfig'to find out what sort of crap is running on my computer and 'regedit' to remove keys from the registry that are set up there to screw with my computer either by spying or causing pop ups or worse.

I'm not an expert at this mind you, but I'm doing the best I can. CWShredder, Spy Sweeper, Spy Hunter, HijackThis, and other programs are a life saver because they allow me to find stupid little bastard files that are dicking with my computer and to blast them off with a few rather difficult but attainable quests to remove them.

Is it fun? Not so much at first, but it's satisfying to send a worm or virus out of your hard drive... FOREVER!!! (or until the next one rears it's ugly ass head)