More Than 3 Out of 4 Enthusiasts Reject Windows 8

gregrocker said:

Panera is the sandwich shop with free wifi where my Aunt takes her laptop so I can connect to clean up the latest spyware attack. She lives in the sticks and has dial-up.

I looked up Panera and all I could see was reference to bread. Now I know why

I do agree with you regarding 'creep' Greg, and also about these so-called 'virus scans'.

I got hit with one of them in my 'net-noob' days on an XP-equipped netbook. It was the very devil to get rid of, and the OS was always flaky afterwards, despite appearing to be 'clean'.

A clean install was the only way to go, as I had no images back then.


Wenda.

Well you know the ultimate solution - pull that plug that connects you to the Internet. Even MS downloads foul some PCs up. As to Opencandy I do not believe it is insidious and easy to remove all remnants if you like. If you want free to air TV you have to suffer the adds.
I've posted a question on "Spybot" in System Security.

Layback Bear said:

I'm not saying a backup or image shouldn't be done. I just stated the restore point works well for me.

For fast minor instances the System Restore feature will generally roll things right back to normal. The advantages of having one or more image available is for the more involved and pointless situations where you would either need to restore an image or see a fresh install go on. That's when too much time has passed or the clutter in the registy as well as system file corruption is too extensive.

Wenda said:

Almost all freeware-carried malware or unwanted programs/toolbars can be avoided by simply reading the installation screens and declining the 'extras', rather than just automatically clicking 'OK', 'OK', OK'....

If a freeware program won't let me install it without the crapware, I simply dump it and look for an alternative.

There's no shortage of them.


Wenda.

There are a mountain of crapwares tossed in with freebie. Not all of them have the easy simply uncheck box however! When trying out ZipOpener off of a gaming site the browser here suddenly would not open yet would be running. You can imagine what the H is going on?!

What they did was package a bbmb in there for browser hijacking! boomday shopping site which backfires on anything Mozilla however while not effecting IE expect soon to see popups or some other crap appear. WaterFox(64bit flavor of FireFox) was even reinstalled trying to debug things. But when going over the programs installed list the bug was found and removed to suddenly see all back to normal.

Generally I will spot and dump any unwanted guest addons while always the custom install option when available. But this was one example of a concealed adware not being found until sometime after showing they tend to be getting things through a bit more cleverly these days!

The one other thing to note is that not all spywares, adwares, bots, etc. will trash Windows where an image restoration or clean install is even needed. Many are simply locked into the registry or have a protected file remaining active. Once nuked the bug is no longer a problem. Saw that with one "get you to buy fake spyware remover" snare where a quick boot into Safe Mode after simply moving the file from one folder to another.

When not being able to nuke it while active in a normal startup it was able to be instantly deleted once rebooted into Safe Mode and the normal scan with the av/antimalware protection to follow once the next normal startup took place found and removed the alleged trojans and fakeware after. The laptop at the time was then free of all bugs and in excellent running condition.

The thing to know is that many of the newer bugs are geared to pass off as normal user install apps to prevent any av or other protections from flagging them as what they by hiding any malicious coding. Once made inactive they can be manually removed usually rather quickly. And that's probably the one thing 8 now can take credit for is having a working MS Security Essentials renamed to Windows Defender included when someone doesn't invest in any better softwares.

whs said:

lehnerus2000 said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

I've had bad luck with System Restore not working so I prefer images. Of course, YMMV.

I've had ~30% of System Restore attempts fail.
Most of those were on XP though.

I've had 2 failures on W7.

There seem to be many different reasons for restore points to either disappear or to fail. If you depend on restore points, you are liable to get stuck. That's why I prefer images that I can manage myself.

I usually create a SR point and an image (when I'm tinkering).
If the SR point fails, I use the image. :)

advertisers will be able to dish up advertising to your computer, based on the searches you perform on your computer.

I'm still not impressed. I was lead to believe that they were going to put ads on the tiles thingy.
I want ads on tiles.

No seriously. 8 is going downhill fast. Now they decided to integrate crapware and spyware in the OS.

Part of the plan. Any wheeze to monetise the consumers. Lovely, isnt it.