That will teach me. I just downloaded a seemingly harmless program called ‘Photo to Cartoon’ because i wanted to play around with some cartoon style avatars. Silly me. 🙁
Downloaded it and ran the install and it simply locked solid… *but* I noticed that my HDD activity light was going mental! Hmmm thought I… this doesnt look normal… so one quick three fingered salute (CTRL/ALT/DEL) straight into the task manager and ended the install task immediately.
Disk activity was still going crazy.
I flicked the Wireless switch on the front to disable network connectivity.
Disk activity was still going crazy.
I clicked on Explorer to see what was going on only to be told the ‘MY DOCUMENTS’ does not exist!!! Aaaargh!!! :/
It was time for a very swift hard emergency power off… I pulled the plug.
My poor little IBM Thinkpad Z60T gave a quiet moan and powered down.
I’ve just powered it back in… very nervously… and bugger…
- no DOCUMENTS
- Desktop is screwed
- DLL’s missing
- and god knows what else its done behind the scenes to poor old windows Vista
/me tuts to himself.
It just goes to show that even Antivirus programs like AVG cant defend the PC against idiots who are determined to run Trojan Horse programs. The most annoying thing is that as I ran the installer I was thinking “Hmmm… I wonder if this is really doing what I think…”
/me slaps himself on the forehead and decides to go for a coffee before making the decision about what to do.
Luckily, I did my weekly data backup last night so everything that is critical is on my handy networked archive drive.
Ok lets think about which version of OS to install this week. It’s 2009, a New Year so maybe it’s time to sample Windows7? Hmmm… could be fun…. I will detail the install, I might even get funky and record some video, here /essential-software-needs-be-installed-when-rebuilding-pc-after-virus