Disk space needed: %#$@ megabytes
(This post was originally titled “Disk space needed: ¶Å§œ‡ megabytes”, but that HTML entity code brilliance caused it to bork a couple of my RSS feeds.)
I’m rehabilitating a non-savvy friend’s old computer. It’s not nearly as disgusting as I feared it would be, but it still has Stuff Doesn’t Work Disease. Everything you try to do - scan for malware, update virus definitions, et cetera - just… doesn’t work, in one way or another.
I’ll dig through it in due course, but the installation window for the latest version of Spybot sums it up.
(PrevX kinda worked, and kinda didn’t, possibly because of the antique version of Norton Antivirus that I just uninstalled because it can’t be updated…)
But why would you even install something onto the system before it was mostly clean? Why not scan it from another computer, or from a boot cd? (e.g. Ultimate Boot CD for Windows)
Comment by SnappyCrunch — February 6, 2007 @ 6:11 am
Because as far as I can see it only had a couple of minor adware infections, it doesn't have enough RAM, and it's being picked up shortly. If I booted something from CD, it'd be chewing away at it all week.
Is it even possible to do a malware scan over the network? How would the scanner do anything to locked files?
Comment by Daniel Rutter — February 6, 2007 @ 6:25 am
I think he was referring to pulling the HDD out, sticking it in another computer and scanning it from there.
Comment by Clayton Lee — February 6, 2007 @ 10:04 am
seems like a prime candidate for pop-up potpourri over at TDWTF
Comment by kamikrae-z — February 6, 2007 @ 1:18 pm
Dan, try Stopzilla and Spysweeper, they seem to pick up more existing stuff than anything else.
http://www.stopzilla.com/download/download_select.aspx
http://www.webroot.com/consumer/products/spysweeper/
Comment by Iceman — February 6, 2007 @ 10:25 pm
You know, I'm almost certain that this post is bjorking the plain RSS2.0, RSS0.92, and RDF1.0 news feeds. If you head to http://dansdata.blogsome.com/feed/ you most assuredly get an error to the effect of:
XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Disk space needed: ¶Å§œ‡ megabytes
In Firefox 2.0.0.1; The atom feed works acceptably well though, because I don't think it is trying to parse those escaped html doodads. Just an interesting point.
Comment by shimavak — February 8, 2007 @ 2:48 am
So it does - the title has duly been changed.
I can see how a minor bug like that could creep into Wordpress, but it's not as if I just blithely pasted a bunch of high-ASCII into the title box or anything; they're all valid entity codes.
(Horrible Things can happen if you decide to put any HTML in your titles in Wordpress, but they at least are obvious on preview - you don't have to wait for someone to tell you that some of your feeds are now broken...)
Comment by Daniel Rutter — February 8, 2007 @ 4:43 am
Wow! They must be a good friend. Nothing short of being held at gunpoint will ever make me go back to cleaning spyware infections from other people's PCs. Not for friends, not for family and certainly not for the cheap bottle of wine that's usually offered as payment for giving up hours of your life doing the most painful thing you can do in front of a computer. Can you tell I'm bitter?
Comment by DoC — February 8, 2007 @ 12:53 pm