Yesterday was Patch Tuesday. That’s the monthly release date for Microsoft to push out patches for Windows; it’s always on the second Tuesday of the month. Today, I’m getting phone calls about computers being down. First call: “When I looked at the computer this morning, the screen said it was shutting down. It just sat [...]
The Federal Trade Commission has gone to U.S. District Court, and shut down, at least for the moment, Innovative Marketing, Inc. and ByteHosting Internet Services, LLC, who they’ve identified as the source of such nasty-ware as WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner, ErrorSafe, and XP Antivirus. Here’s their press item: http://www.softwarekb.com/news/2008/12/11/court-halts-bogus-computer-scans/ This group of rogue programs has made [...]
I’ve been getting some very specific complaints about Nero 7 Essentials. “The computer slows down. It crashes. Started with the new DVD writer.” All the drives in question were bundled with the OEM version of Nero 7 Essentials. Time for another test. Test box for today is running an Athlon XP 1900+, Windows 2000 Pro [...]
Had a request to look at this site. Tried it, with my usual test box of totally clean, totally unpatched Win XP Home, no service packs, no antivirus, no nothing of any kind, just running a hardware firewall in the router. The about.htm page asked me to install the Chinese Language Pack. Answered OK, it [...]
Downloaded and tested the Crawler.com search toolbar, which allows users to search multiple search engines at once. Test run Aug 25th, 2005, clean Win XP Home, no patches, not activated, no drivers except automatically-installed items from the Windows installation. Items listed as detected by HijackThis. Installing the Crawler toolbar added these items to the system [...]
