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BrockStrongo
July 18th, 2010, 01:51 AM
I just spent 6 hours of my life trying to recover a winblows Vista laptop from the brink of death.
189 instances of malware
34 viruses (according to avast)
10 rootkits
and a completely destroyed registry thanks to a "registry cleaner" (not run by me) only to find corrupted system files that resulted in a reinstall. (at least I backed all their files up.)

I have been using linux for two years now and have never had to do any of this on my own machine.
THANK YOU UBUNTU, AND LINUX IN GENERAL

cariboo
July 18th, 2010, 02:01 AM
If it takes more than 2 hours for me to fix a broken windows installation, it isn't worth my or the customers time to continue on, a backup gets done and a full new installation gets done.

ST3ALTHPSYCH0
July 18th, 2010, 02:47 AM
If it takes more than 2 hours for me to fix a broken windows installation, it isn't worth my or the customers time to continue on, a backup gets done and a full new installation gets done.
^ agreed. Depending on the speed of the machine and the amount of crap to backup, a fresh install only takes about 3 hours including updates and drivers.

Groucho Marxist
July 18th, 2010, 02:51 AM
I just spent 6 hours of my life trying to recover a winblows Vista laptop from the brink of death.
189 instances of malware
34 viruses (according to avast)
10 rootkits
and a completely destroyed registry thanks to a "registry cleaner" (not run by me) only to find corrupted system files that resulted in a reinstall. (at least I backed all their files up.)

I have been using linux for two years now and have never had to do any of this on my own machine.
THANK YOU UBUNTU, AND LINUX IN GENERAL

I know the feeling; granting root access to end users at all times is not the best of ideas.

On another note, your avatar is glorious :D

McRat
July 18th, 2010, 04:00 AM
I don't think anyone deliberately spends 6-10 hours trying to fix a computer. You think you'll fix it in 20 minutes at first.

You just keep thinking, "Well, what if I try this?" just one more time and the day is gone.

I spent 4 hours Friday trying to "fix" a XP computer. It was tragically sluggish. There was no malware though. I have a feeling it was a bad update. I didn't have a WinXP disk for it, so I kept trying to update it to Service Pack 3 hoping that would fix it. In the end I found out it was a known problem with no acceptable fix (incompatible power management chipset).

It took a whole 30 minutes to install Ubuntu on it, because I spent 10 minutes looking for my install disk and cleaning out the inside of the computer.

kaldor
July 18th, 2010, 05:30 AM
I really don't get how people manage to have problems like that on Windows. It's bad, yeah, but even when I used Windows 98 and XP at home I only had 2 instances where malware got into my system.. and only on XP.

My dad used IE6 exclusively (if it's not recommended by the ISP, it's a scam) and I used Firefox. So yes, we did have those typical computer retards in the house. Oh, and he insisted on using Norton for malware protection.

You/your family go on p0rn too much using IE5 ;)

BrockStrongo
July 19th, 2010, 04:12 AM
This was a computer I was fixing for my girlfriends cousin, surprisingly there was no porn whatsoever in the temp files. This computer was messed as a result of being constantly connected with no virus protection or firewall for over two months. And yeah it was a matter of "oh I'll try this," or "maybe this will work" until I decided better off to backup and reinstall.
I have no problems with windows, I have been running xp for years on one machine and never had to reinstall. It just amazed me how buggered up this vista machine was.

BrockStrongo
July 19th, 2010, 04:19 AM
I know the feeling; granting root access to end users at all times is not the best of ideas.

On another note, your avatar is glorious :D

Glad you like the avatar. Thanks

MasterNetra
July 19th, 2010, 04:48 AM
I use Commodo Firewall (proactive defense not enabled), Avast for AV, Threatfire (to pick up the slack) and CCleaner for general maintance (reg too, defrag is done by win7's own defragmentation tool.) and no real issues thus far. Win7 is generally well behaved but WinXP of course is the real nightmare to manage.

Megaptera
July 19th, 2010, 05:24 AM
I spent many hours trying to fix my dad-in-law's XP but in the end installed Lucid - he loves it!!
Another thanks to Ubuntu!

Khakilang
July 19th, 2010, 05:34 AM
If I discover more than 30 virus, spyware or malware. I just backup the data and format the whole computer and reinstall the Windows. No point trying anything else. This I learn from experience. Trying to kill those virus and fixing the Windows take a lot of my time and eventually it will come back again. So format and a clean install is the only solution for Windows. Using Ubuntu was the best choice I made.

murderslastcrow
July 19th, 2010, 07:00 AM
It's kind of ironic that so many peoples' reason to use Ubuntu is Windows, not just that Ubuntu is good by itself. I think if we didn't have a Windows to compare it to we might be in a completely different computing arena at the moment.

... Nevermind, we criticize our own work constantly. I don't think a lot of developers take Windows into account outside of file formats used by Windows-only applications. Then there's Emesene and KMess which focus on being just like MSN Messenger. But outside of that, everything on Linux is fairly unique and useful. Even if that means it looks different from that stuff people are used to in the Windows camp.

chriswyatt
July 19th, 2010, 01:16 PM
I remember cleaning out my brother's computer, it was a nightmare. Not to mention that his friend installed some virus software for him (which was a virus itself!) and also that installed a bunch of other viruses as well. Viruses that install other viruses are a pain.

In the end I had to use about 5 different virus removal tools and run them all consecutively with the internet disconnected to try and stop the viruses coming back again. Got rid of them all in the end. I did suggest Ubuntu to my brother but we decided it's not really for him. ;)

I never had any massive issues like this when I was using Windows, I think the only virus I ever got was the Blaster worm and that wasn't too destructive or difficult to get rid of. I've had various bits of Adware which were easy to remove as well. Also I can easily spot scams, they usually stick out like a sore thumb, that helps a lot as well.

wkhasintha
July 19th, 2010, 02:00 PM
oh Vista, no wonder lol

Actually It's users responsibility to keep it safe.