I had a whole crap-load of things I wanted to write about today, but I came home and re-staged my PC instead. Why? Because during some intensive web surfing yesterday I hit one of those rogue search engines that try to force you into downloading some form of ActiveX plug-in and instead of clicking the NO button as I usually do I clumsily hit the YES button instead. ARGH!
Could not, for the life of me, figure out what it put where on my system and I couldn’t locate any kind of a utility that would show me what plug-ins and ActiveX doohickeys are installed on my PC. Fearing that it could be a trojan program trapping my keystrokes and knowing that I do some online banking, I opted to play it safe rather than sorry. So we took off and nuked the planet from orbit, just in case.
Wait… no… I backed up my data and then nuked my hard drive, just in case. So four hours later I’m back up and running with a shiny new install and no time to write all the wonderfully enlightening and witty commentary I had all lined up. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.
http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Used it, it didn’t find anything. Tried Spybot Search and Destroy too, nada. Not sure it actually installed anything, but as I said, better safe than sorry.
That always sucks; I’ve mis-clicked more times than I care to remember, unfortunately, resulting in many restagings over tim. I feel your pain.
My wife has no sympathy for me. She just shrugged when I mentioned it and said “It’s not like you don’t restage your PC every other week anyway.”
Yeah, but those were all intentional restages!
Uh… intentional vs forced
now I get it….
ha
Future reference: Norton Cleansweep (now part of Norton Systemworks) can list and remove plug-ins and ActiveX components.
Yeah, I just realized that the other day. I don’t normally install Cleansweep as it tends to be a resource hog. I don’t think the benefits to it outweigh the minuses. Though it would have been handy to have installed when this issue came up.