And now for the scheduled failure.

[avias]

I seem to have picked up a particularly invasive and tenacious virus on my laptop. It's just over a year old, so something like this was bound to happen.

Comments

[autobottrixter]

This is why I love buying parts at MicroCenter.

I've heard you can yell at Dell until they send you proper discs, but I've never tried it and I don't know how much stress it would be.

[xsr]

[Obligatory 'Use Firefox!' statement here]

[repowers]

I got nailed using Firefox a few weeks ago, so even it is not immune these days. My PC caught some kind of shit that popped up virus warning windows right over top of Firefox and inevitably redirected you to some supposed scanning software page. Between nuking some stuff off of Msconfig's start tab and installing a couple of extra malware scanning programs, I seem to have gotten rid of it.

[avias]

This *WAS* through Firefox. That's the price of people telling everyone to use Firefox for security reasons- the asshats who get their jollies writing these things start targeting it, too. But as an old Netscape veteran of the original Browser Wars, I'd never consider using IE regardless.

Like I implied, I suspect it came in through something on DA. I had a bunch of other tabs open at the time, so I can't be sure, but everything started going weird right as the Mosaic page was reloading it's ad banners. (Something that DA does way the fuck too often to begin with.) I've seen a fair few other mentions of ad-borne viruses lately, so it seems as likely as anything.