Long story short, I've been out of commission the past few days due to a freak accident ending up with me tearing a muscle in my neck -- couldn't turn it to the left at all and ended up passing out from pain -- so I'm on a tab or two as I type; bear with me here. I've been on Panax ginseng for about 4 days now, which is really helping with the recovery, it seems -- 10 cc, liquid, from China, Prince of Peace brand, if you're into that sort of thing.

Anyway, I haven't made a post until now because my laptop charger bit the dust. I have a Lenovo T410, and the charger is very... distinct. Quick check of the voltage confirmed it was dead, although the laptop itself is fine. This is good, although I'm not sure where in the hell I'm going to find a T410 charger, or at least a similar one that won't blow up the charger port.

This brings me to the laptop I'm on now, my niece's, which I'm forced to use, rather than my phone, as the NG news editor doesn't work on my Jellybean OS. Shit, what a piece of work this thing is. We'll call her K for the purposes of this post, but Jesus Christ, the amount of viruses on this machine before I laid hands on it was astronomical, and somehow, I think more are crawling in through the temp folder. Most of it was adware, browser hijacking, and annoying malicious uninstalls worked around so that if you were frustrated, you'd just end up installing more of the same shit with every button click.

About the Repair

IE had been hijacked to Trovi and Bing searches, and this setting went through all the browsers. She also had installed some suspicious browsers like "speed browser". What an original name that, eh? Yeah, turned out to be a hijacker/adware spout. Eventually, I managed to delete and end-process enough of these to get IE to a functional level, without every page I searched for to turn into a hijack, and I downloaded Avira, cleaning out the temp folder as I went. All in all, I cleaned about 70 viruses by hand, and Avira found several more when it installed. If not for AdBlock, I'm not even sure if I could make it work. Even now, links are popping up from the text I've got down, so I clearly have a lot of work to do -- about 400 blocked ads since I started typing this post, now that I mention it.

I also uninstalled the worthless piece of shit that is McAfee. Gonna get back to cleaning out temp and settings now before I sleep tonight and take my ginseng. If anyone has heard of a way to permanently get rid of Coupoon, Search Protect, and its malicious friends, mail me please. Even Avira, end-processing, manual uninstalling, and deleting is turning up sparse results, and they keep finding ways in. I may just save K's most personal files on a USB and factory reset this piece of shit notebook. (IMO, it should be illegal to design a PC without a fan -- HP bastards)

Moral of the Story

Never install programs from sources that look unofficial, offer to clean your PC or boost performance, or have "optional programs" bundled in. Never express install. Never download coupon programs. Never install ANYTHING you haven't looked up first. Malware and adware writers are counting on unwitting idiots to ply their trade, and they know just how to get around your average antivirus -- or in McAfee's case, virus -- so you'll be sitting there at your PC, tearing your scalp off, trying to figure out how to get rid of the problem. A little research saves a lot of havoc.

Also, I usually don't approve of using AdBlock on NG due to how revenue is earned and paid out to other users, but in the case of adware, God in heaven am I happy I'm using it now. 488 ads from these damn programs and counting. They're even trying to link to ads in the text I'm typing, bastards!

Wish me luck getting rid of them!