You’re my only hope! Today I got a distressed call from my younger brother Nick. He franticly explained to me how he couldn’t play any of the games on his PC and his anti-virus software is telling him he’s infected. As you can imagine a non-functional high end gaming PC at the beginning of school holidays is about as frustrating for Nick as what Iraq is for Bush. So naturally as the family’s tech support person it’s my job to take care of the drama again, not that I really mind.
The problem is this situation is happening far too often for my liking, and I place the blame with bloody spammers and partly with insecurities in Windows. Unfortunately it’s difficult for anyone to do anything about spammers but luckily Windows is a different story. Microsoft have been working long and hard to significantly improve the security features of Windows XP with service pack 2, and in the next few months we are going to at last see the fruits of their labour.
With these new found security enhancements I can only hope that the panicked calls from my family are, at the very least, less frequent. What I always wonder is, what do people do when their computers break down and they don’t have a geek like me to fix it? It must be very costly indeed.