IT Bytes

I’ve previously written that I have grave doubts about Virus checkers. Well this weekend my g/f laptop (XP SP2) found itself under attack from the malware known as ‘XP Antivirus 2008’ – yes it’s a genuine virus/malware masquerading as a anti-virus tool. Fortunatley Norton Anti-virus spotted it pretty quickly and did just enough to stop it causing too much damage. Although it didn’t get rid of it completely it stopped it ‘working’ and with the additional help of Malwarebyte the system was soon cleaned. So 1:0 to the Virus checkers. However, the previous week my version of Vista running on the Mac via Parallels started to act very oddly. Visual Studio wouldn’t compile properly, Task Manager wouldn’t go away, Windows Update wouldn’t…update. I quickly narrowed it down to AVG anti-virus not correctly updating. Every time I stopped it attempting to update everything else worked fine. So I tried to uninstall it, the uninstalled just stopped after about an 1 hour of doing very little. I rebooted in safe-mode and uninstalled it in an instant. Good ridance. Finally I can get back to using Vista…1:1.