Hammers it home

I have just finished spending the last two nights cleaning down my sister-in-laws Windows XP machine of all its spyware and viruses.

In fact, its still grinding away in the corner of the room as I type this. I still have to defrag it after it has done an extensive anti virus scan of the hard disk and when I give it back I will have to explain the wonders of ZoneAlarm to her too!

I had to use several utilities to get the PC clean including StartupList,, KazaaBegone, BHOCop, ToolbarCOP and CWShredder.

My Macbook on the other hand…. well… it just hammers it home how good they are. Not to be worried by any of this crap maks me feel justified that I bought it. I can flip open the lid and surf and not worry that some pesky DLL is going to get in an crap all over my system. Perfect. I can see now why they recommend them for grannies!

I even used the MacBook to share my internet connection with the aforementioned pooly PC as my router is on one side of the room and the PC on the other. I have had dealings with Internet Connection Sharing on XP before and it has never been easy. On my MacBook however, I went to System Preferences, clicked Sharing, highlighted the Internet option, ticked the Built In Ethernet option and then clicked Start. About 25 seconds work i’d say.

All I did then was to plug the PC into the MacBook using a cross over RJ45 cable and off it went!

I am loving this little beauty more and more each day!
Hmmm lets see what that PC is doing..

aprox 65,000 files scanned so far
0:12:15 mins scan time
80 viruses found so far

UPDATE: I have just found an article from ZDNet that describes how the leading antivirus softwares missed virus and malware infection with an 80% miss rate! The software was not named (and shamed) but Symantec and McAfee account for most i expect.