Pwn3d.

Posted October 19, 2006
Filed under: Lessons Learned, Microsoft, code monkey, linux |

My main machine at home has been completely owned by spyware. I feel like such a moron for letting it happen, but what’s done is done. After fighting it on every front imaginable (yes, I tried that; and that too… yeah yeah, and all of those!) and calling in my paternal IT support; all to no avail, I backed up what little data was on my Apps drive (seperate HDDs for data and apps is a Good Thing!) and whiped it clean.

Now the fun part — installing Ubuntu, the plethora of applications I need and XPpro under VMWare server. Hopefully VMWare server will give enough juice to XP to run Photoshop, as that’s the only reason I need Windows these days. It’s at this point that I’m oh-so-happy I chose Internode as my ISP; their Ubuntu mirror server allows me to apt-get install everything I need at lightning pace without affecting my bandwidth quota.

Windows will never again have access to my master boot record. Move on Windows, you’re no longer welcome here.

5 comments so far

  1. heretic on October 19, 2006

    Mmm, reinstallation fun. Or, not fun.

    Actually I have to sort out a random crash problem. I suspect the new RAM I bought back in brisvegas is faulty, not sure it’s worth trying to do a return by mail though. Bleh. Guess I’ll take out half the RAM for a few days, see if that solves it.

    Internode isn’t bad so far (just signed up with them). Although the radio stations seem to need to re-buffer a whole >:(

  2. heretic on October 19, 2006

    * whole lot, that should have been. grr.

  3. Andrew K. on October 19, 2006

    Ben: if you run memtest86 over the memory that’ll tell you if it’s stuffed — if it is, send it back north and I’m sure myself or one of your other Brsvegas associates will help you out :)

  4. Lessons learned Blog Digest - Pwn3d. on October 23, 2006

    [...] Windows will never again have access to my master boot record. Move on Windows, you’re no longer welcome here. Posted by Andrew K.This article impressed me very much.Link to original article [...]

  5. Colin on October 26, 2006

    Damn, looks like there’s a lot of that (reinstalling) going around at the moment? Could this be the tipping point to mass migration?

    Again, I’d be joining you if my blasted modem would work under linux. Oh, who am I kidding, I still like all my windows apps. Just need to stop using the internet.


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