Well, the one thing I love about being an independant consultant is that I get to do lots of different things, not just work on Mandriva stuff. One of the things I hate doing is Windows maintenance and it seems like there is a lot of that going around. Inevitably it’s the same symptoms leading to the cause… expired Norton Antivirus protection, lack of a hardware firewall, and the reliance on software like Ad-Aware (which, BTW, I’ve never used or heard of up until this past Sunday).

So I have a friend’s machine here, for which I’m charging to repair, of course, that’s doing all kinds of funky things. I get some kind of sadistic pleasure in re-formatting these drives… but that’s dampened by the fact that I have to backup data and figure out a way to get it all back clean. That already proved an issue with Windows file-locking and the inability to copy files that are in use (how silly is that?).

Ah well.. for all you poor Windows suckers out there, may I offer a few words of advice? A Linksys firewall/router is really cheap… and offers way more protection than some software-based firewall (on Windows, of course). Buy one. Please. Also, if you need a virus scanner, don’t let Norton or McAffee gouge you with inferior products… use ClamWin which is a port of ClamAV for Windows. Not only is it free, but it works. For spyware, the only recommendation I have is get another OS. I’ve never looked at any of those solutions but if Ad-Aware is one of the “best” in that category, my brothers who are slaves to the Windows beast are in trouble.

Oh, and use Firefox and Thunderbird instead of Internet Explorer and Outlook.

Now I’m off to try to get some of this data back onto his machine and hopefully not lose any of it due to viruses or other malware (am I off my rocker or does ClamWin just report/delete/quarantine files? I thought virus scanners could clean files too or have they just given up on this?)

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