Almost 5 years have passed since I erased my Microsoft Windows partitions to switch to Mandriva Linux. However, I try to keep myself informed of what happens in the Windows world, just to be able to help relatives when they're in trouble. Yesterday, I had a Windows box to cure. Here's what I was painfully reminded:

Finding what is wrong is extremely time consuming. If you're not the person who installed the program, you have no way to know from what the "add/remove programs" tells you, what a program really does. No description. No file list. Nothing. So you can't just uninstall everything that has a name you don't know/like. You're then left to hours and hours of scanning, in the hope that you chose the right tools, and that they will detect the annoying software that causes the problem. Well in fact, it didn't happen. Neither the antispyware not the antivirus could catch it.

What was utterly annoying, was the fact that I left the computer on the whole night to let the antivirus perform a complete scan, but that this piece of sh*t just stopped at 35% to show a popup asking me what it should do with the virus it had found.

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