Got spyware? Get new PC!

Oh the posts are just rolling in today... here's a great story about someone who bought a new PC because their old one had spyware. I guess that person didn't know about reinstalling the OS from scratch. For many that's just too complicated even if HP makes it relatively simple. For whatever reason Dell continues to ship reinstallation disks that require hours of work to recover your disk to a non-shipping state (it wipes out all their super-duper Dell diagnostic partitions).

Anyway, as someone who has done a bit of professional IT support for regular Joes I can attest that this story is almost certainly true. I helped one guy who had a Sony PC and was asking me, completely straight-faced, if it was salvageable, or whether he should just "send it back to Sony". Its true that I spent an entire day working on his two home PCs to erase all the spyware - my first big spy-ware removal job. It cost him about $250 for my time (quite cheap actually compared to commercial services), but he was happy, very happy - and he didn't even loose any of his personal data. The funny thing was that he'd recently purchased DSL from SBC and his wife was convinced she still needed to keep paying $20 a month to AOL so she could read her AOL email.

Its really quite sad how hopelessly lost your average adult consumer (9-year old Microsoft Certified Professionals aside) is when confronted with even the most basic computer problem. Sometimes I really just want to pack up all my delusions of being a software engineer and take up home PC support full time.