Guage

And he's always going on about some place called Eye-Rack.....

Cheers Richard

Not for the last 15 years or so - I know no one who thinks the British way is best anymore (and that's being very polite)! The Gallic Shrug or Spanish Reasonableness are viewed with growing enthusiasm.

Cheers Richard

That's two of us then!

I'll get me coat......

Cheers Richard

"..... And to face it all bravely, With God on my side."

Bob Dylan

Cheers Richard

beamendsltd said the following on 21/01/2008 08:33:

I went into one of these phishing sites a while ago (deliberately and securely!!). They really are quite convincing, and I can see how people get caught out.

kim said the following on 20/01/2008 20:47:

Hmm - do you have a link? I couldn't find one. Does it just give you the 42 digit code that the Indian call centre would give you over the phone? I don't want to make that copy of XP illegal or not updateable.

All the work PCs are off-the-shelf Dells :-)

It's a four stage-process which circumvents MS' registration process altogether. It even works with Windows Genuine Advantage installed!

(kim)

[...]

Take course in language history and linguistics. You've incorrectly grouped languages and left out the Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages.

Actually I have (precursor to doing Latin at school, at which point I lost interest)! Though it was a good few years back, when such thinking was rather frowned upon (English was English by God in those days!) - things may well have changed of course, though a programme on Radio 4 a few years back wasn't wildly different. I deliberately left out the Slavic stuff as I was talking Europe as in EU original countries (note to self - make clear distinction between EU, "traditional" Europe and geopraphic Europe these days).

Cheers Richard

kim said the following on 21/01/2008 13:18:

Ta!

The above link tries to download a virus!!!!

Jeff

On a previous machine the "install disk" was a legal image from the supplier (IBM), not a standard install. But when I upgraded to XP I converted from FAT32 to NTFS.

I got a particularly nasty infection via of all things a McAfee update. This overwrote part of TCP and removing it left a blind branch to nowhere so attempts to go on line crashed.

The backup was also infected.

So I tried to reinstall XP. And got a system crash part way through.

After which it decided that I needed a full price install rather than the upgrade.

The Indian call centre told me to reinstall from the manufacturer's image. Which would have lost all my data. Eventually they realised this but still couldn't help me.

They wouldn't give me a key to let me use the upgrade disk and told me I had to either buy a full price disk or borrow one.

Eventually I found a friend with a pukka Win98 disk so I reinstalled that and then ran the XP upgrade.

And as soon as McAfee started up again the infection was still there so I went through the process again.

This time I ran an evaluation copy of an antivirus before and after each of the programs came up. That's how I found it was McAfee doing it.

So I deinstalled McAfee, went through the process yet again and switched to one of the other security packages.

The whole thing sucks.

A decent home PC should have at least two disks. Not partitions. Install the OS on one, applications and data on the other. Backups can be via a USB attached disk that doesn't have to be particularly fast.

But you can't buy machines off the shelf like this.

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:42:57 +0000, beamendsltd wrote

A two-storey house. Take the roof off, remove the top floor then bung a low roof on the remaining floor :-)

Christopher A.Lee wrote: [...]

So where did you get your copy of McAfee?

[...]

Yeah, well, the download is via Torrent - anyone who uses Torrent is just asking for trouble. That's why i didn't d/l the hack.

HTH

Downloaded from the McAfee web site months earlier.

Jeff said the following on 21/01/2008 15:21:

Not a virus exactly, but not something I want on my PC either! Incidentally, you need to be quick to download the .torrent file - it's when you hang about on that page that it starts trying to run the nasties, which may be what you've seen. I used a "safe" PC at work to install BitTorrent, grabbed the d/l, then cleaned up the PC, removing any references to btdna.exe or DNA after uninstalling BitTorrent.

Wolf K. said the following on 21/01/2008 18:03:

I normally steer well clear of torrents for much the same reason. Also for the same reason, when I install the fresh copy of XP I'll check these hacks as thoroughly as I can before putting anything else back on.

I don't feel guilty about this because I'm using a legal copy of XP on only one PC, but MS just make it difficult to upgrade.

Christopher A.Lee said the following on 21/01/2008 16:52:

Personally, I regard McAfee itself as a virus, as it seems to have much the same effects. Despite my protests, all the machines in the company under the new owner have McAfee. Most of the time I have to disable it to allow certain programs to work properly, whilst others have weird effects. Shared folders can be especially strange - I often have to hit F5 to refresh them after making changes otherwise Windows doesn't recognize a file rename, for instance. Another PC kept opening the C:\program folder on startup (used by a PIC programming program) because McAfee hadn't put the full path it needed in quotes in just one line of it's configuration - that's sloppy.

FWIW, I use AVG Free on my laptop and Kaspersky 7 on my desktop PC.