The Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak is a modern classic thriller that details the horrific effects of a killer virus that ravages a small American town, as well as the effort it took combating it, to the point where unthinkable means were to be employed to combat the spread of the deadly virus. The most disquieting scene in the film is where the infected individual is in a crowded movie theater and starts coughing. Slow motion photography caught the spray from the soon to be dead man’s mouth as it settled on everyone in the theater. Well, that’s how I felt one Friday afternoon in the middle of May when a mutant killer virus attacked my cute little Sony VIAO VGN-T ultra portable, and connected 7” by 11” notebook. Three weeks and over $500 later, I am still not quite sure what hit, but I can honestly give you a lay person’s play by play, blow by blow breakdown of which anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-adware programs work and which don’t — all 21 of them!

There I was, minding my own business, working on my blog, harming no one when I realized that things were slowing down a little. Suddenly a maelstrom of web-sites appeared out of nowhere, hijacking my Internet Explorer. I quickly emailed my current blog posting over to my new Macbook Pro, which I was still setting up, realizing that something was terribly wrong. Then I started taking the usual steps.

I admit the system is vastly underpowered with one gigabyte of RAM, but the price was right. During the summer of 2006 I had been attacked by malware that nearly ruined a previous HP laptop. When I took that specific laptop in for care, the computer geeks repairing the problem removed my Norton programs and replaced them with AVG. When I replaced the older HP with the now infamously buggy HPDV8000 I opted not to run Norton but decided to try the newly released Microsoft One Care, which had been running on my detested HP DV8000 along with Trend Micro-Systems’s Venus Spy Trap, AOL’s package of spyware, and a Microsoft Window’s Defender. The cute little VIAO joined my growing family of notebooks in January. I was having no problems with the programs I was running on the DV-8000 so I simply installed them on the VIAO. The DV8000 suddenly, and without warning crashed on me in March. I was faced with the prospect of having Vista installed on the hated system when I sent it in for repair. The DV8000 is so bad, such a horrid machine that I made the life-changing decision to go to a Mac.