Good Enough PC Goes To The Basement
I just spent hours working on an old PC that once resided in my daughter’s room. It was badly infected with spyware and adware. Spybot took care of most of it, but I had a persistent NSIS Media infection. I finally think I beat it using a combination of manual and automatic techniques. The last traces seem to be gone now, thanks to NSIS Media Remover and several uninstalls and re-installs of Firefox to deal with an infected “chrome” folder.
The PC in question is an old emachines with an 800 mhz Celeron and 384 mb of ram. Still, it’s running well at the moment. It’s in the basement, far from the wireless router, but the cheap old Blitz usb Wi-Fi adapter is working well.
Windows ME is no prize, but it’s doing the trick on this, our fourth working net-connected PC. I think I’ll keep it in the basement so I can get away from the family for some serious work on occasion. With Office XP (aka Office 2002), an old version of Paint Shop Pro, and the latest Firefox, I can do most of what I need to down here without having to drag along my laptop. I could have just re-installed ME or even Win 2000 or XP, but I didn’t feel like dealing with all the drivers. I did partition the hard drive while I was at it, so I can save drivers there if I do need to re-install (and it may come to that, if past experience with NSIS Media is any indication).
There’s a lot of life in old PCs, if you’re willing put in a little effort. But re-installing Windows is usually the best choice when any PC gets seriously gunked up with crapware. But for now, good enough is good enough.
