So a little while back, a co-worker brings in his dads (Ted) computer for me to look at for him. Turns out it is riddled with viruses and spyware and other crud. The worst of these seemed to be some sort of Zlob-Media Codec infections which mess with the start menu (removing just about all the menu items), puts VIRUS ALERT by your system clock, and just plain messes with the registry.

He had an older version of AVG on there, so I tried to do a scan with that, then downloaded the newest version as well as SpyBot Search & Destroy. I was able to pick off a few of viruses through AVG, but at this point it wasn’t 100% updated because I was not about to plug this thing in to my network and let it online. The aggravating thing with that was that SpyBot didn’t seem to want to run until I let it to do an update. Long story short, some of the stuff got detected and dealt with, but now the computer won’t boot up at all. I get some sort of Virtual Device Driver DLL initialization from command.com and that’s about it.

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My thumbdrive has been made obsolete.

Ok yea, I have a number of computers. Three desktops floating around the house right now, two laptops (one going to my sister rather shortly), and then there’s my desktop at work. The home network is great, when I’m at home. But does me no good when I’m at work or out and about with the laptop. So for that, I have been using a 4gig thumbdrive. And it is a pain in the rear when I forget it at work and need it at home or vice-versa.

Well, I no longer have to worry about that, cause now I just Dropbox.

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Ok, as I posted yesterday, I bought a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. The biggest problem with it, it runs Vista.

I’ll deal for now, but there are a number of things that have to be done to make this thing “ready to fly”. First thing I did was download Firefox. I haven’t done a lot with add-ons with FF3 yet, but I’ll have to look in the best way to sync my bookmarks tween work, home and laptop now. Second thing I did was burn the restore DVDs, so if I need to, I can go back to factory fresh. I am debating on taking this thing down the Linux road… we’ll see. I have some programs I need Windows to run, so until I can test them on the desktop with Wine, I won’t be going that route.

Next thing was ditch MacAffe for AVG. Just a no-brainer there. I had to bite my tongue in Best Buy - While waiting for someone to help me, I observed another sales guy talk to a customer about antivirus and spyware, giving him two packages. “They both have anti-virus and spyware, but the spy-ware on this one sucks, and the virus protection this one sucks, so between these two you’ll be covered.”

Next was Open Office. There’s a 60-day trial of Office on here… need to figure out how to get rid of it without messing anything up. I wish I could get Evolution for Vista… I’m using it on my desktop and rather like it, so will probably stick with Thunderbird for now.

I have AutoCad, a mapping program, and some construction related stuff for work I need to get on here, but beyond that I’m not sure that I’ll be putting that much more. I have portable versions of a few things like GIMP, Pidgin and a couple others on my thumb drive that I may use here and there. The whole idea is for me to keep this thing light-weight. The majority of the stuff being done on it will be web based or basic spreadsheet and document writing.

Oh yea, when I unpacked the thing, the battery said 75%, and about 1.5 hours remaining. So I figured.. hey.. 2 hour battery. Not bad. Not great. But now that i’s fully charged, it’s telling me there is just over 3 hours remaining… so that’s better. I may look into a second, or a larger battery… but will wait and see how much I need to work just off battery for a bit first.

I use Firefox for my browser when ever humanly possible. I have installed on my Windows box at work and on my Windows based laptop. Of course it is on my Ubuntu boxes here at home. I even keep the portable version on my thumbdrive.

If you use Firefox, good for you. If you don’t… why not? You should be. And just another reason to do so is the add-ons available. I am not a power-user by any stretch, but there are some that I use that really do make my browsing life easier… and I’m going to share a couple with you now, and more over the coming days. (don’t want to overwhelm you after all.)

I am not going to get in to any real depth here, I just want to point out these things out and give you my basic impressions as to why I use it.

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I bought myself a Christmas present today. I was looking at TVs, wanting to make the move to digital… but I’m not quite ready to plunk $6-700 for a decent LCD.

So, instead I plunk down $500 for a new computer.

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Ok, I spent most of Friday evening and yesterday archiving a bunch of old files to spare hard drives with my usb-ide cable. A 20gig drive has all the old files that I know I haven’t touched in forever. Old versions of websites, old documents, etc. Also dumped all my “my programs” stuff where I keep copies of programs I download to try. That pretty much filled that up and then it was all deleted from my D drive.

Moved all my photos to a 15gig drive - I may put them back on the hard drive once the switch is over, we’ll see. Copied all my MP3s to a 10gig - I’ll figure a way to back up my music to this drive every once in awhile from now on.

Defragged the D drive, it’s a 120gig that’s about 1/3 full at the moment. My external 120, Z drive will get formatted and ready for new backups once I’ve settled in.

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