Well, it’s been an interesting morning. I’ve been lamenting the speed of my work computer for some time now, and have secretly wondered if there was perhaps a virus on it. I’ve been running antivirus software and updating virus patterns regularly since 2000, and haven’t found anything - until this morning.
I’m not even sure what the virus was. It was detected and quarantined and I didn’t really care, as long as the scanner picked it up. See, the real issue is that the version of antivirus that I was using was purchased in 2000, and I recently got a popup during startup saying that future pattern files would not be compatible with my old antivirus version, and that I should upgrade. Ok, fine, so I did.
The problem is that the new antivirus program also includes a firewall. Normally this wouldn’t be bad, but I like my existing firewall better than what the antivirus people are offering. I uninstalled the old antivirus program and installed the new one, and poof - the computer won’t boot. To be more clear, it hangs at login as soon as the “Loading your personal settings” window appears.
I booted to safe mode and looked around, but really, this gives me an excuse to nuke and pave this system. Since the stuff I’m working in is very client-light, I can install the programs I need on a fresh system in about 15 minutes. Provided I have a clean Windows XP Ghost image of this system sitting around, I can be up and running in about a half hour.
Unfortunately, there’s no Ghost image. Even worse, for whatever reason all of the Windows XP disks have vanished. All I have are copies of Windows 98 and Millennium Edition. Ew.
And so I’m hosed. Except during my search I found one of my copies of Knoppix 3.3 (in Mahesh’s office? What the heck…) and I tossed that in the system. The computer came up, albeit in fuzzy 60-hz refresh mode, and I’m browsing via Mozilla with full scripting.
Now it’s just a matter of finding a good text editor, FTP client, and email client in Knoppix, and I can put off reinstalling Windows for a good bit of time. But I will be returning to Windows - I’m not a sudden Linux convert, especially not for Debian, where I can’t use Kylix.
