Category Archives: Just Blogging

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately. In my defense, I’ll lay out the old “I’m so busy” excuse. Pretty lame, but there is some truth in the statement.

As you know, this is not the only blog I maintain. I have been blogging a lot at work. I’ve also been wasting a lot of time with Google Reader. The pre-installed feeds are wonderful. It turns out there actually is some fabulous content on the web. Check out Google Reader, and be sure to subscribe to this blog! :)

The other thing that happened recently is my trusty old clone PC became infected with a virus. For a moment or two, I contemplating ditching the thing altogether and making the often-contemplated switch to a Mac — that is until I compared the price of a decent Mac to that of a decent Dell box. Luckily though, I decided to rebuild my machine from scratch before shelling out the cash. It turns out that this was definitely the best option.

I am diligent about backing up my Windows machine. I use a simple one-line script and smbget on my Linux server to make a backup of all my Windows data every three hours. This backup is then copied to a third machine with rsnapshot. Having these backups is one of the reasons a bare-metal install was so easy. The other thing that made the process fast and easy is that I always copy the contents of my software CD’s and DVD’s to my Linux server along with a file containing the product serial numbers. So, completely rebuilding my machine from scratch took just a few hours. I’m sure this is less time than it would have taken to eradicate the virus, and as a bonus, my machine is running better than ever, because this time around, I know more about what Vista features to disable, and I have only the software I really need installed. And my data? It’s safe as always on my Linux machines.

My advice? The next time you find your virus-sponge of a PC becomes infected – reinstall.