I have no idea what you really just said, I have to depend on Norton and Malwarebytes on the pc. Now if I could only figure out how to really clean up the computer so it would run faster.

I made money over the years thanks to Uncle Bill too Tux. lololol

I agree; I virtualize but do run a pure heuristic anti-trojan detector (Threatfire; it's free. Actually, it's designed to run in parallel with a normal anti-virus program but I don't run an anti-virus in my VM). I virtualize since I've seen way too many systems get infected. You have to be discipline, but, when done right, virtualization is akin to using your friends PC to browse the internet and not your own. That's the beauty of virtualization. I actually dual Sandbox my browsing (i.e., run Sandboxie inside my VM and Sandboxie is another type of virtualization). I do run MSE in my Win7 Host but I never (or rarely) browse using Win7 keeping it in near prestine condition. Not sure what I will do when XP is no longer supported by MS for security updates, but I'll make a decision then as to what I will do at that time.

It's nice to see that we are all here after the doomsday!

Well, make sure you are only running one anti-virus scanner in the background. It's OK to have more than one AV scanner installed, just make sure only one is resident and scanning in the backgound. AV apps are resource hogs.

You should also perform disk maintenance, such as defrag, clearing cache and temp files.

You could check to see which apps are being ran on startup and make sure you aren't running any processes you don't need. Windows app are notorious for installing resident processes that suck up resources.

If you want to speed up websurfing, you really need noscript. Many websites run so many dang javascripts, flash vids and other embedded junk, they're so slow they are almost unusable. With no script, you can whitelist only the scripts you need to navigate the website and keep all the other junk blocked. I can't imagine surfing without noscript or some other blocking mechanism that allows me to whitelist/blacklist on a site by site basis. Websites loaded up with scripts run much faster when you only run the core scripts needed to navigate the site.

Lastly would be a registry cleaner. Registry problems can bog down your system. Although at times, it can be difficult to troubleshoot registry issues. You'll also need to make registry backups before any manual editing.

There are times (about every year or so) when it makes more sense to reload Windows and start again. My technique was to install a clean copy of Windows, tweak in everything just like I wanted, then ghost that image to another drive. If things got slow or something went wrong, I could restore my custom image and I'd be back up and running at high speed again.

I agree with registry cleaners for XP but I've not ran one with my Win7 OS yet and it's still pretty spiffy. To be an honest engine, I've not run one with my XP VM for quite a while either; might run regcleaner right after this post. lol

So i am wondering how you go to the Canadian website and check for the virus if the FBI has shut down your service.
You can't check for the virus if you can't surf the web on the same machine that may be effected ...can you?

Reports on the news say to call your ISP and they'll help you remove the malware. I mean, you'd think that's the first thing someone would do when they lost internet service, anyway. They'd call their ISP.

Lyle, I'll have to admit that my experience with Win7 has been pretty good, especially considering all the futzing Vista required just to do simple tasks. Vista was the worst MS offering since Windows ME. I've recommended Win7 Pro to several of my business clients. Networking and sharing resources using Win7 is fast and easy and it seems to be fairly stable OS. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.

I agree about Windows 7. It was the best Windows I have run across. It has a lot of extra goodies that I really liked. Yes, Tux, Windows ME and Vista were a nightmares.

Meant injun and not engine (I do have more then enough Chippawah in me to be honest). lol

My brain's been making a lot of mistakes like this (typing) recently (other places that I blog mainly).

I do use Win7 Pro Tux. Win7 has got to be the best OS I've ever seen Microsoft produce. To bad they are about to ruin it with Win8. lol

You could always switch to Linux Lyle ,then you will be ruined forever.