Last week I drove out to our office in Reston to trade in my laptop. After a scant 4 years and 3 months, the Powers that Be decided that my Dell had finally reached the end of its life and needed to be put to pasture.
My new Dell is fast, has XP (which I do not like - the interface is cartoonish and wastes space) and a freakin' GB of RAM. Wireless networking is also built in.
The new trackpad is taking a little getting used to (see previous post) but otherwise I have no reason to complain. Actually, I have a reason to laud: System Restore.
Some well meaning buddy sent me an email with (unbeknownst to him) a fun little bit of malware attached. (Don't ask who: we worked it out.) As soon as I opened it my Norton Antivirus popped up with a virus alert. Usually this is the end of the story, though not this time:
Clean failed:Quarantine failed:Delete failed
Translation? "This is going to hurt a bit."
In a matter of seconds I had dozens of pop-ups, dozens of new icons on my desktop, and CPU usage like I was looking for aliens. I started to panic a bit, freaked out a good deal, then calmed down and remembered an IBM commercial I vaguely remember hearing in the background: something about a big undo button.
Sure enough, System Restore had taken a checkpoint of my system the previous day. Click the restore point, click "Restore," and restart.
It was all gone. All of it. Some of the files stayed (Restore doesn't move files, so you don't lose document edits) which were quickly removed by a virus scan, and I now have no ill effects.
Of course, when I consider I've had all of one Mac virus ever (and that was a Word document macro virus) I still wonder how Microsoft gets away with it. Sure, gauze and tape is helpful when you've been stabbed, but if you can avoid getting stabbed in the first place, that's all the better.
Posted by Bogg at March 3, 2005 11:41 PM
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