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Hi,
A couple weeks ago my little brother stayed the weekend. He brought his
computer along with him, because he's as much a digital junkie as I am.
I thought I would install Phun for him, since he's really into mechanics
and physics-based mayhem in general. But every time I tried to navigate
through directories, Vista would pop up with a message telling me that
his computer may be infected with spyware or a virus. I got to looking,
and sure enough, there's like twenty icons in the system tray, and a
bunch of unusual tasks running behind the curtain. Toolbar this, agent
that. It was ridiculous. My little brother had no idea what half of that
stuff was. So I headed to the control panel, to see what I could
uninstall. It was like a battlefield, with the computer side losing. I
did the best I could, deleting every potentially malignant piece of
worthless software I could find.
My question is how does does this happen? And why does it happen to some
people more than others? How can a person be downloading and installing
software without even knowing it? All I can guess is that it must be
like what I experienced a few weeks back, when I accidentally clicked
"yes" to a pop-up dialog. (my one and only incident in over ten years of
computing [yes, I'm proud])
Do any of you out there know people who always seem to have infested
computers? Can you spot a pattern of (mis)use which may be valuable to
help these people keep their computers healthy?
Sam
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