Troubleshooting overconfidence





After installing and updating a spying/advertisement robots detector and a free antivirus in my daughter's and my step brother computers, during my year-end visit to California, I found my home laptop computer getting very very slow.

At first I thought it was the new wireless card I installed on the DSL connection, but the operating system was increasingly degrading, just like the dead desktop I keep in my living room, to fix as soon as I find some time available; the plan is to replace the floppy drive and re-install an old operating system before upgrading it to Windows 2000, which is not getting installed by itself from the original CD Rom that came with that PC.

Back to the laptop, I was trying to update the antivirus, when I realized that there was no icon present or active on the task bar; furthermore, on the antivirus web site, there is an announcement that they no longer support the version I had; so I un-installed that antivirus, rebooted and installed the same free antivirus I used in California.

Leaving the antivirus detection overnight, it deleted 6 corrupted files and isolated 20 other infected files; now it is active all the time, until a more advanced virus deletes it like before; this happened because I either forget to update it, or a new virus came my way.

In an old machine at work, which I suspect it is monitored, a free personal firewall keeps me alert of each new network communication; anyhow, with so many icons all around my browser, I was guilty of overconfidence and it may probably happen again.