Of Spyware and Windows XP

I've only had this new Lenovo Thinkpad X60 notebook for little more than a month. Already I've had 2 major spyware infections.

It's now about 2:15am and I've just re-staged / reformat & reinstalled my month-old notebook. It'a got infected with spyware yesterday and it just went downhill from there. I had AdAware, Spyware Blaster, Microsoft Defender Beta 2 and Ewido Mal-Ware installed. But even with all this freeware firepower, I still couldn't clean the spyware completely. And the more scans and cleans I ran, the more Windows became corrupted. It got to a stage where even the simple file manager or window explorer became unstable and hung every time I had it open for more than a couple of minutes.

But luckily, the Rescue & Recovery software in the X60 is excellent. About 5GB of the hard drive is partitioned off for the recovery program and ALL installation files. Having not done any backups, I chose to restage or return my X60 to factory specs using this software (which ran independently of Windows). It got everything reinstalled in about 2 hours. This software is so good that you can even connect to the internet or connect a USB drive without booting up Windows.

After reinstalling virtually everything, I've just finished making a recovery backup in case I need it again in the future. This way, I can restore the system to a recovery point, rather than to reinstall the factory specifications.

Damn, it's 2:30am. I need sleep. Good thing I'm done. I'm going to get some shut eye.