Fixing a sick PC
A colleague and good friend dropped past with his sick home computer. Somehow it had become infected with a swag of stuff including SpySheriff, a corrupt illegally distributed anti-spyware program. After removing the Spyware, we took about 30 to install some additional precautions to improve his system security including:
- Thunderbird e-mail client, making it the default e-mail client and removed MS Outlook and Outlook Express. Whilst he uses Outlook at work, he loved the clean Thunderbird interface. All he wanted was an e-mail client at home and that was what he got.
- Firefox web browser, making it the default browser and removing all shortcuts to MS Internet Explorer. An extension handles pages that can only be Viewed in IE. He loved how Firefox now handles popups and downloads.
- Spybot - Search and Destroy, a free spyware detection and removal tool and ran a full system sweep. It found some addition Trojans on his system that were promptly removed.
- Leaving an update to OpenOffice.org for a future date. See how all this beds down first.
He was also interested in the idea of having a copy of the Ubuntu Linux live CDROM handy as an emergency backup if his system dropped out again.
All these fixes were free and most are open source.