I found myself dealing with a serious system failure the day before yesterday. Despite my obsessive precautions a trojan horse managed to invade the mainframe which controls the financial empire of Tournesol Inc. No problem of course, the magisterial authority of Norton360 had it all under control. A flashing message on the screen alerted me to the infection and told me exactly how to respond to it. Download the trojan removal tool. Switch off Windows automatic system restore. Run the removal program..................
Why isn't my system responding as expected? How come it has seized up. Why is it frozen? How do I get out of this mess? After a prolonged attempt to recover I had no alternative but to switch it off at the mains and try to reboot. But of course that didn't work because the system restore thingy I'd switched off whilst following instructions means it can no longer be rebooted. If only I'd asked the right question, I might have realised the danger earlier.
Lengthy calls to the international headquarters of the Symantec Corporation determined that
a) its call centre is located in the Asian sub-continent
b) its staff are amazingly charming, polite and helpful
c) English as spoken there is so heavily accented as to be almost impenetrable.
I understand that in the Second World War, US Intelligence used Cherokee Indians as radio operators because there was no way that intercepted messages in spoken Cherokee could be decoded. Symantec seems to be applying the same logic.
After several hours of what would have been communication, if only we had shared a common language, it was finally borne in upon me that my system was beyond recovery by mere mortals. I would have to call in special forces in the shape of my local computer shop. Alas I know them all too well from previous adventures in cyber intervention.
So, yesterday morning, bright and early found me nabbing the last space in the tiny car park behind my bank and struggling in the narrow gap between cars to extricate my computer from behind the driving seat. As I sidestepped the back door into the bank in order to slip down the narrow alley on to the high street where the computer shop is located, I found myself face to face with Nigel Farrage who was just finishing a telephone call…
You might have a look at the ubuntu operating system - a quite refined version of linux which is available free from the canonical organisation (just google it)
Fundamentally different from windows, much more secure, with an enormous range of well written (and free) applications to support it. Firefox works and there are good mail clients too.
I dipped my toe in this pool a few years back and whilst I keep up to date versions of XP and Windows 7 available, I find I never use them.
You couldn't pay me to be a regular windows user now.
ftf
PS - very interesting perspective from Mr Farage. I'm beginning to wonder if UKIP doesn't offer some interesting alternatives to the wet conservatives now in power.
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