Reduced to tears
Oh. My. God.
I’m sat here trying to pruge my parents’ Windows box of spyware/adware, and is it a painful and tedious and utterly infuriating process. Swearing has been my main tool so far. Both Adaware and spybot have not managed to remove everything, and I’m now hacking things by hand. But it’s quirks of Windows that hinder here – you can’t, no matter what your user level, delete the binary of a running program. Sort of a nice idea, but not in this case. No matter how often I shout at it “I’m the admin, let me do what I want!” (along with more expletives than is posibly healthy for this hour of the day) it refuses to let me do what I want. Of course, the fact you try and look things up and your browser gets hijacked by popup loaders whilst you’re reading just leads to more tears.
I’m thinking along the lines of petrol and matches at the moment (actually, napalm, but I suspect that’s harder to get a hold of this early on a Sunday, even given Scotland’s more enlightened Sunday trading hours).
(Note that I’m typing this from my Ubuntu running laptop, having disconnected the parents’ PC from the Internet for the sanity of all involved…)