How Does The Common Person Do It?

What a day of fixing and fixing and fixing! After Elliott and I fixed the basketball hoop, and I got the water heater thermostat switches installed (still working by the way!), we went and picked Ashleigh up from school after her all day science competition. We came home and I was all ready to cook us up some nachos and watch a movie. But wait - somehow Ashleigh managed to download some nasty and pervasive spyware on the laptop! NOOO! She swears she didn't intentionally do it but it happened just the same. So for the next 5 hours or so, I went to work scrubbing it out. It changed our wallpaper, went online, kept popping up warnings and false error messages and blocking access to files I needed to get to to shut it down! Even in safe mode I couldn't wipe it out. And by "it," I mean the many files and running programs and .dll's that were scattered all over the computer. I would think I got it, run a scan for 45 minutes, and find there were still bad things going on. Finally, I found a fix that would kill the process, then wipe it out. And it did a great job. Once that was killed, I then had to go through and eradicate all the orphaned files. But I got it and all traces of it.

So I am thinking to myself, how in the world would the 'common' man have taken care of this? Really. I have a clue what I am doing and it took 5 hours! And I have access to two other computers in the house to go online with and look things up. Someone should sue the people that write these spyware and virus programs for lost productivity time. Tonight, it cost the family Nachos by Shawn (they had to settle for Nachos by Lucie). And the value of Nachos by Shawn? Priceless...