Okay, so just an open question here. Please do respond if you have any personal knowledge on this issue.
Since the problems (conveniently discussed below) with my old PC continue, I decided to try to find some other sorts of malware/trojan/virus removal programs. Most of which I got from download.com. Here is the problem: They all give you a ‘free trial version’ which will show you all sorts of malicious crap on your machine, but not a damn one will actually remove it unless you pay for the program first. But, you see, I wouldn’t be looking for a new program to remove this shit if the current programs I have could do it… Currently all of the programs that I have to remove this sort of thing completely freeze the PC when the trojans in the registry are being removed. They simply will not do it. How in the hell does a company expect me to pay 30 bucks for their product when they won’t even let me see if it will actually do the job that it was designed for? It is like I just said to my wife, no one would ever expect you to buy a pretty new car just based on looks, they always give you a test drive.
I do understand that in the world of computer software it would be far too easy simply steal the products, hell I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro that is on something like day 1246 of my 30 day trial period (I actually did buy the license for it, but lost it on a system restore and never bothered to register it again). Isn’t there some way that they can make it possible to actually use the software before purchase? I was thinking that maybe it could quarantine all of the objects, even if only for 24 hours, to let you run any system scan you want to make sure that it actually got rid of the crap. Then, if you don’t purchase the license, it just reinstalls all the crap that it got rid of. There has to be some way that you can actually test this type of software before laying out cash for it.
The open question is: Do you know of any programs that will actually remove the trojans from the registry before making me pay for the program? Or, failing that, a program that will simply give me the actual path name so that I can do it manually?
Any help would be appreciated
It is Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Well you may have noticed that it has been quite a while since I posted anything here. No real reason why, well I guess there actually are a couple of reasons why, just they aren’t very good reasons. The main reason is that I just really didn’t feel like it. The other reason is just a lack of interest stemming from very little response to what I do write. I never expected that I would be getting hundreds of emails every day, but I would have thought that I could have generated a hundred in the course of a year, which did not happen.
As the anniversary for my site approached I briefly thought about not renewing the domain and giving up altogether. Why I decided against that is something I may never know. I guess I really do enjoy having the site when there is something on my mind that I really want to bitch about. It is a pretty liberating feeling to know that you can throw all your opininons out there for the world to see, regardless of the fact that only a handfull of the world ever actually read them.
This is all self-inflicted of course. If I had chosen to do something other than feature a couple of stories that I wrote a long time ago, like, say, have an actual theme, or actual content, it might make the readership swell a bit. Unfortunately, my only expertise is in the butchering of deceased bovines, I doubt that this would make for very stimulating reading for anyone who was not in the industry. I could spend more time commenting on news items, but that has been done to death IMHO and done far better than I could do it anyway. If I was really interested in generating some hits I could simply feature a Porn Pick of the Day, as it seems that the only search strings that result in hits to my site have the word porn in them.
When I made my decision to keep the site open, I made another decision at the same time. I am not likely going to ever be back to doing a daily update. That being the case I am going to quit wasting the time to save each page individually. I am going to start having a weekly update page with any posts made during the week separated by Horizontal lines. The latest update will always be at the top, and if the page seems to go too long I will add handy linking to the particular days (not that I forsee this as being necessary at my current posting schedule). This will have the added benefit of making it easier for me to set up an archive system, if I ever get off my ass and try to get caught up with that. The major benefit of this (for me) will be to have multiple posts on the same page, thus people who only visit once a week (and never click any links) may actually find something worth reading and, hopefully, commenting about. It’s my fantasy damn it! I can pretend to believe anything!
• Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I treated my wife to dinner at a local place and we exchanged cards. Of course we actually exchanged gifts on Friday night, as we both bought each other computer software, and they were both newer titles, and we didn’t expect that either of them would work correctly on the old PC. Boy were we ever right, but more on that later. The games that were exchanged were Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 , which she bought for me, and Leisure Suit Larry – Magna Cum Laude which I bought for her.
If you have never played any of the Leisure Suit Larry titles, you should know that it is not exactly the type of gift that you should buy for a woman unless you are very sure that she has the sense of humor to appreciate it. The entire premise of the game is that you are a guy, a real loser, and the entire game is spent trying to get women to have sex with you. This lends itself to a lot of hilarious situations, and it is one of the most entertaining series of games I have ever played. The wife also loves the humor and situational comedy, that is why I felt confident to buy it for her, as a Valentine’s day gift no less. I even went so far as to pay extra for the uncut and uncensored version, just to gurantee the most humorous gaming experience. Yes, it is fun. I would highly recommend it.
The latest Roller Coaster game is pretty sweet as well. They completely changed the interface and I have been having a hell of a time learning the new commands, but it has so many more options that it makes up for it all. The single best part of it is the option to ride the rides. That lets me actually get onto the roller coaster and see why the people don’t like to ride them. It took me a while to figure out how to import the roller coasters I designed in the other games, but once I did I was easily able to see why no one wanted to ride them.
One of the coasters that I built has an intensity rating that is about 24 (which the game calls ‘ultra extreme’) and having seen it run through on the pc screen, I can see why. There is probably not a span of more than a half a second where there is not an inversion, there are so many loops and corkscrews that I lost count, and it is a launched coaster; launched directly downhill. I can see myself having a lot of fun with this game just trying to make the most fucked up riding experience (for me at the monitor). The strange thing is that when you sit down in the chair and watch the ride, you feel yourself leaning into the corners (at least I did, but that may have been just since it was such a new experience). Definitely a very enjoyable game. I will probably write more about it later, after I have gotten a bit more used to the interface and all of the available options.
Getting back to the issues with the old PC. The old PC only has a 466mhz processor, but it does have 256mb RAM, a 64mb 3d video card and a 40gig hard drive. It meets most of the requirements for games that are coming out today, the only one that it really lacks is the processor. The thing is that all of the titles will install and run on it, then randomly freeze. Not like just run really slow and choppy, but complete lock up. It didn’t seem to me that it should do that if the processor was just a bit slow…
I spent quite a bit of time on Friday night trying to figure out just what the hell the problem was. I found that by running Ad Aware from safe mode I was able to remove a lot of crap that I wasn’t able to do while in normal Windows (98) mode. Then, via AntiVirus.com, I found that I have two Trojans in my Registry. The unfortunate part of that is that it doesn’t actually tell you anything other than a name (which a search of my pc did not find a match to). I downloaded a Registry Editor from Download.com and got the same result. If you know anything about computers, you should see where this is going.
The only way that I am able to get rid of the trojans (which are both just spyware, but they are memory resident) is to boot into safe mode and run Ad Aware. Then I have to go to either a normal or clean boot, either options is going to load the Windows Registry, thus reinstalling the damn spyware. If I knew the actual command lines for the damn things I could just go into the Registry and delete them myself. Problem is that if the trial version of the Registry Editor told you the command lines you would never need to actually pay for it. I am certainly not going to pay the $29.95 to buy the Registry Editor for this PC, since it may or may not actually be worth that much at this point, but I sure would like to be able to get rid of those damn PC slowing trojans.
I actually have a ‘rescue disc’ for the pc in question ( the one that I am typing on right now, as it were) which could restore the entire thing back to factory settings. There are many problems with that option, most of which are not all that serious, but one is horrible. I could get past any of the problems with most of the after market stuff, like the cd burner, the video card, all of that. The problem is with the hard drive. When I bought the 40gig hard drive for this pc, it took me several hours of fucking around in the BIOS to get it to work properly and recognize the size of the drive. The drive did not come with any sort of an instruction manual, so I had to do a long guess and check game to get it to work in the first place (not to mention that I had to modify a cable to get the thing plugged into the motherboard, since the motherboard did not support this type of drive). That is something that I am really not planning to do again, unless it is obviously necessary.
If you happen to be privy to information about removing trojans from the registry of a windows 98 system without simply wiping out and re-installing the software, please do tell.
That is all for today. Tune in at some future point for more…