Daily Archives: January 14, 2014
Tuesday . . .
Another beautiful day in the neighborhood. Jan and Mister and I sat outside and enjoyed our coffee. Well, Mister didn’t have coffee. He just enjoyed licking himself.
But we all had fun.
I took the day off from chores and worked on some computer things for a couple of clients. Still working on the laptop that was infected with the Conduit Search problem. I’ve got most of it cleaned out, but there’s still a ‘poison pill’ left in there somewhere. After Conduit Search is removed, everything works, but it keeps trying to come back. SuperAntiSpyware is blocking it, but warnings keep flashing up which gets to be annoying very quickly. But I’ll find it eventually.
Conduit Search is one of those programs that you usually infect yourself with. It normally gets installed because you didn’t check carefully when you installed another piece of software. You need to read all the fine print in the “Terms and Conditions”, and at the bottom of the install screen, usually a number of check boxes that if you don’t uncheck them, you get all sorts of junk along with the problem you wanted.
Conduit Search is not a virus per se, but is usually referred to as a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Program), though I think the acronym should be Positively Unwanted Program.
Running the paid version of either SuperAntiSpyware or Malwarebytes should protect from this being installed on your system. Note I said the ‘paid’ versions, because the programs have to be actively running to do this, and only the paid versions allow this.
FWIW I run the paid versions of both. They don’t conflict.
For the record, these are the “protection programs” I run.
AVG Free Virus Protection
ZoneAlarm Firewall
SuperAntiSpyware – paid version
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware – paid version
CCleaner
Glary Utilities
Microsoft Security Essentials
If you have any questions about any of these let me know.
About 1 PM Jan and I headed out to have lunch at
King Food and then some errands. After lunch I made a client stop for a few minutes to update some software. I’ll be back here Saturday night to do some stuff that can’t be done in the daytime when they’re using the system.
We next decide to check out the Wal-Mart down in Texas City, and Jan said “Never again”. Traveling around so much, we’re used to finding Wal-Marts with different layouts, but this one looked like someone had just scattered the rows out at random. It was the screwiest layout I’ve every seen.
As Jan says “Never again”.
Thought for the Day:
Foolproof system are always undermined by fools.
adsfadfa
