Windows is Wonderful, Part 9488

A computer virus got into my system. I noticed my system had been acting a little funny, then this Sunday my wife complained about hers, so I started looking. I've been running Zone Alarm Firewall for quite a while (months? years?) and hadn't had any real problems. So I run "Spybot Search & Destroy" and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware on both our systems, but they turn up nothing significant. Well, maybe it's time to load some new anti-virus software. I had been running AVG until they came out with version 8 and it started crashing Firefox. I looked at the scan history and it hadn't found anything for months, so I just removed it.

Well, burned once, twice shy. So I started looking around for a different anti-virus package, and I came across something called Kaspersky, from Russia. Well, this could be good, or this could be really, really bad. I look for info and what I find seems to indicate that it might be worthwhile, so I give it a try. It won't install. Claims AVR and ZoneAlarm are in the way and need to be removed before I can proceed. Well, this isn't good. ZoneAlarm is my friend, and AVG is NOT installed. I removed it last time I had trouble. Still, it might be worth a shot. So I remove ZoneAlarm, but the AVG is still marked as installed. I am not going to spend any time trying to figure out why AVG is still marked like that. I try to install Kaspersky again, but still no go.

I don't like not having a firewall running, so I try to reinstall ZoneAlarm. Go to their website and they claim you need SP2 (Windows XP Service Pack 2). Well, no problem there. I have it, against my better judgement. So I go to the download page and now they tell me I need SP3. Sorry, bud, that is not going to happen, not without a real good reason, and just you wanting it doesn't qualify.

I must have a copy of the old ZoneAlarm installation file around here somewhere. I remember I made a security CD some time ago with a bunch of these programs on it. Where is it? Gone, Daddy, Gone.



So I poke around and I find that Windows now offers their own firewall. Part of SP2 I suppose. Well, we'll just turn that on. Now we have some sort of firewall at least.

Back to the Kaspersky installation problem. Maybe if I reinstall AVG and the re-remove it, that problem will go away. Well, shoot, if I have to reinstall AVG again, I may as well try it out. Maybe they have fixed their problems. So I do, and I scan my computer. It takes 4+ hours and finds two virii, and they are off in some internet cache, not likely to cause any trouble, not like an EXE file in the Windows directory.

So that was Sunday. My system has been acting a little weird since then. It takes forever for Firefox to load (tens of seconds, I tell you, tens!), but once it loads, everything seems fine.

Until today, and then everything goes blooey. I had to pull the plug and reboot to get control. And then there's a warning, it wants me to run chkdsk. So I do that, and now things are back to normal, or at least how they were before it all went blooey.

I look at the AVG scan logs and there is nothing: it hasn't been scanning the disk. Oh, right, I changed the power settings (under screen saver, of all places) and now the system hibernates when you ignore it. Which means you have to push the power button to wake it up. Seems to work okay, but AVG can't reach out from the disk and push the power button, so we have a conflict of interest here.

This Windows stuff is starting to get annoying.

Of course, today I go to the ZoneAlarm page to verify the link I put in this post, and there is no mention of SP2 or SP3. Bah.

Update August 2009: Gnarls Barkley video on Google went away. A little looking turned up another copy on wat.tv, but their embed didn't work: it opened a window to their site to play the video. A little more searching turned up a copy on myspace.com, and their embed code did work.

Update September 2015, replaced missing video.