For a few days, the XP desktop in the living room -the one we use to watch movies, play music and get remote access from outside the house- had been misbehaving. I thought it was the usual been on for too long syndrome, but as the machine has to be always on, I did the usual: wait until it crashes. It eventually did, so I hit the power button and looked at it while it restarted.
It never fully came back. Windows booted and device drivers loaded. Auto-run programs also started, but Explorer never did, so there was no desktop, no taskbar and no way to interact. Hitting Ctrl-Shift-Esc brought up the task manager and from there I could start Explorer. Things seemed to be back to normal. Until, that is, when I tried to start Cmd and it just plainly refused. No matter how I tried, it refused. Then the Control Panel failed, and then, too late, my free copy of Avast home edition popped a window to let me know I had been infected with who-knows-what virus.
A boot-time scan later, the situation was dire – thousands of files infected and no way to clean them up. I got an evaluation copy of Kaspersky to see whether a commercial product would do the trcik, and it certainly found more virii and cleaned some files, but the infection had reached over 4000 files and many, most of them part of windows itself, were beyond repair.
Great luck that I had installed Ubuntu on the PC when the current version came out. I was able to log in, use ClamAV to kill all traces of infection and have a functioning Linux system. Ubuntu can read and write Windows drives so all my 3 hard disks’ contents -years worth of old documents in various formats mostly- were safe. The OS was a goner though, and I was not looking forward to investing a couple of days reinstalling windows XP and all my apps… so I won’t.
Ubuntu’s got all I need on an entertainment/server/remote access gateway PC. It works rather quicker than XP and everything you may need is an apt-get away. It’s a bit rough around the edges -drivers for my WLan stick or printer are not available, so a cable and print-to-pdf will have to do, but overall it’s got fewer quirks than Windows had and if I must use a windows program there’s always Wine, or login to a Windows machine using VNC, a great tool used the world over for remote support.
I’ve been looking to move to Linux for years, since the time at University where we used to swap Slackware on a few diskettes and toil at the command line. I’ve even been using Ubuntu for years on my old laptop, Microsoft having given up on it’s paltry processor and memory long ago. Today, at last, I declare myself windows free. It was a good day to catch a virus.
