As with any and all things. Free doesn’t necessarily mean good.
Some free things are exceptionally good. Open source software is a great example. I won’t draw the distinction between speech and beer. Except to say that both are good.
I was tasked with fixing a computer. It was a Windows machine. So all the things that spring to mind were what was wrong.
If only people would choose more wisely. Examine what it is that they are being offered. Is it really worth installing ?
In this case it was the attempt to fix / remove the malware, spyware and virii infestation. Nearest I can figure they were using whatever first came to hand. Its not necessarily their fault.
As far as can be determined. The antivirus software was causing the menu bar to disappear, hijack the browser and cause reboots at random.
I disabled all non essentials with msconfig. Installed a spyware remover. Had it clean out malware and spyware.
The plan was then to run Housecall to look for virii. Unfortunately it locked up during the scan. The harddisk deciding that it was all too hard. It crashed unceremoniously with no warning.
Not even the usual plaintive grinding noises. Reboots yielded an error message that there were no drives.
The last resort is to try and recover the data by putting the drive in an external case. Crossed fingers that it responds.
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