Last night I tried to help a relative of Lan’s remove the About:blank spyware from their kids’ Windows 98 machine. The tricky part was that they live overseas and they speak little English and my Mandarin is even worse.
But that didn’t stop us from trying.
Much of the two hours was spent “chatting” back and forth in Messenger, exchanging screenshots and instructions. Unfortunately, all the spyware tools I could find couldn’t remove the permutation of the hijacker they had. We’re going to try again next weekend.
Since this is a kid’s machine it’s rather old and they’d rather not spend any more than they have to. Two weeks earlier they took it into a repair shop to have viruses removed and they’d rather not to have to do that again.
Because their OS is so old, I suggested that they download FireFox and limit the kids to using it in hopes that at least they won’t get tripped up by more ActiveX issues. I hope this works out.
Of course, the next best thing to do is to install Windows XP, but I understand that they are trying to save money and make due with what they have. It’s just that they are spending a great deal of time (and some money) chasing down these virus problems.
It’s at times like these that I wish I had a couple extra Windows XP licenses to give away. (If anyone in the Microsoft MVP program is reading this, you can add this to a suggestion list.) From time to time I go around helping friends and relatives with their machines and sometimes it just seems so much easier to say “upgrade” than to try to fix the problem, but they can’t. Many times they’ve already spent their budget at the local computer repair shop trying to fix earlier infestations. And it’s going to cost them quite a bit to wipe things out and reinstall–something others would have to do for them. So it would be nice if I could give them a legal copy of Windows XP to help get them on the road again. I don’t see giving more than a 3 or 4 away a year. Yeah, I know I can just buy it myself. I should.
