Posted By Ian on Aug 23, 2004 | 0 comments

     I’m pretty tired of the unnecessary work that people’s children and childish adults cause me. File sharing is fine if you know what you’re doing, but if you’re just going to click Yes on every annoucement that you see and install whatever you feel like installing, you’re going to run into trouble and it’s going to cost me time. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Instead of doing productive new work on things, I have to waste hours upon hours of my time scanning for viruses, cleaning them up and then scanning for spyware and adware and cleaning that up. The only good thing that I can say is that at least lately it’s been the fast computers that I’ve been cleaning up, but even on them it takes more time to clean up the system than it does to re-format and re-install everything.

Crap you should know

• Hotbar is not your friend. Neither are most programs that do something ridiculous such as add smileys to your email or show you special links to special sites. Don’t waste your time with that crap. If you want to smile at someone, go to their house and smile at them, either that or settle for a basic 🙂

• Your computer is running slow, you probably have done something really stupid to it. First thing’s first, you can install a virus scanner and get rid of whatever it is that you’ve done. I recommend the free virus scanner AVG Anti-Virus available from Grisoft.

• Clean up your system regularly with some sort of program that gets rid of spyware and adware. I like Spybot Search & Destroy but I’ve been told that Adaware is better.

• When in doubt, don’t! You can’t get viruses and junk on your machine by not clicking on something. The more paranoid you are, the better. It’s really not hard to not click on something.

• Another thing people like to do is to not do Windows Updates. That’s just wasting your time by something that you could easily prevent. Microsoft has flaws, and they own up to them, typically in time for you to protect yourself from a ginormous onslaught of hackers attempting to read your resumé. Another thing you should update constantly (make it part of your daily routine!) is your virus scanner and your adware/spyware removal program. They’re pretty much useless with out you doing the updates.