Hexed and Vexed

[threadwalker]

My PC was virus-free on Friday.

The only website I visited this weekend was LJ, to do those posts. Now I have a virus that turns off my virus protection. I already used all my PC tools to de-hex myself and it hasn't worked.

I'm really pissed off.

Plus, every 20 seconds the Norton system keeps flashing a message at me, "Your auto-protect is off, please deal with it", which slows down my machine and gets me killed in my fav computer game.

Hubby recommends I contact customer support instead of "doing something drastic and irreversible on my own". (I was poking around in my files and commented, "how can you tell which ones are important? Can I delete everything that has a string of numbers and a "file" extension?")

Comments

[carbonphoenix.livejournal.com]

Try AVG or Avast :)

I know you know this, but...

[beanolc.livejournal.com]

Viruses come in emails, too.

Re: I know you know this, but...

[thread-walker.livejournal.com]

hahaha! Despite my "live under a rock" approach to PCs, I did know this. I get devilish amusement at work when someone opens an e-mail that eats their computer. By and large, if I don't recognize the sender, it gets deleted. And unless I specifically asked for the attachment or knew it was coming, I don't open stuff either.

However, I didn't even check my mail last weekend. Truly, only site visited was LJ-land. Now there's a virus. :-(

Very annoyed.

[loup_noir]

I use a combination of things to keep my machine clean. For one, there's Ad-Aware and for another there's Spybot. Both are freeware. I try to update the definitions once a week and run them both. They each find slightly different objects. For my main antivirus, I use AVG (the pay-for one). I used to use TrendMicro, but it was and probably still is a resource hog.

I suggest downloading both Ad-Aware and Spybot and running those to see if they help.

[thread-walker.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll do that tonight.

Last night I purchased CyberDefender and it caught a bunch of stuff. But you can't know how thorough it is until stuff starts behaving pourly. Hopefully I'll have a good net when I add these two you suggest.

the inside track for Norton

[d-mon-chick.livejournal.com]

I just got around to catching up on LJ. I'm the global product marketing manager for Norton Internet Security at Symantec. Go figure! a real job.
Anyway, if you are still having problems with your Norton I can help you. Call me. Rat has my phone number.

Be aware that if you run more than one antivirus product or more than one spyware product on a single PC, you can run into huge performance problems (we are talking orders of magnitude on slowness) on your PC because the two systems are competing to perform the same process at the same time. I've seen some of the test results on this and it can be really dreadful. The kicker is, however, every security software protects you from a slightly different set of things, many overlap but there are always variations due to differences in technologies and design decisions. And, none of them are able to protect you against everything or resolve everything...okay, I'll stop now but I could talk you ear off on this subject since I live and breath it everyday.

Again, I'm at your disposal as your personal Norton insider.

Re: the inside track for Norton

[thread-walker.livejournal.com]

Hey - good to see a post from you.

Hey - a real job! Can you do it from home? that would be totally cool.

I've heard about the competing software thing. Although what I have right now (with both Cyberdefender and Norton) is faster than the virus-whammied PC from beforehand. Tons faster.

We have Norton/Symantec 2004. Probably not cutting edge whereas my Cyberdefender is shiney and new. I was thinking of unistalling Norton and then just reinstalling it monthly, doing a clean sweep, and then uninstalling it again.

But all I really do is periodically surf the web and play City of Heroes.

Awesome icon, by the way! And super-duper grats on legally tying the knot w/ Rick.