April 28, 2005

DUI : Downloading Under the Influence

So last weekend, as I killed the night with a few rum & cokes, tooling around on my computer, iTunes playing in the backround, I decided I just HAD to have an mp3 of Europe's "Final Countdown" (for those Arrested Development fans reading, thats essentially GOB's theme music). I Googled it, and came up with some hits pretty fast. I was amazed how easy it was to find this song without the aid of a p2p network. Was it because it was an obscure 80's band that no one should rightfully care about? Has the song been so lambasted it's considered public domain?
Regardless, it was mine to have. Unfortunately, my trusty pop-up blocker was working full time against my drunken mouse clicking. My goal was in site, but the Hotmail toolbar wouldn't have it! So, I deactivated it - surely I knew what was good for my computer and what wasn't (I also knew that dogs couldn't look up, so who's to say what judgement levels were like at the time).

Bam. It was mine. I immediately listened to it several times. I think I may have even acted out one of GOB's magic acts during the third play through (I was wearing my swank white button-down...) . Sure, I may have had to install some sort of program or such to download it, but it was mine, and I couldn't wait to go driving around with it. That program seemed legit enough (bum, bum, BUMMMMMM!)
The next day, I started noticing the numerous pop-unders. Numerous. I'm fairly sure they were keyword related, as well, because I was looking up a book I heard about on NPR about a Viagra salesman, and I'll be damned if I wasn't getting pharmacueitical ads (granted, it could've been a coincidence, but similar ads popped up for other keywords). Hell, I followed a link to eBay (a legitimate link) and my damn computer nearly exploded from all the opening windows. So, after running every program at my disposal (EVERYTHING Norton Systemworks 2005 has to offer plus AdAware and X-Cleaner) I still have them. Not as many, but enough that they bug me. Everytime I run my programs, they pinpoint two specific .exe files that are the cause of this problem, to their exact location, but I can neither delete them or quarantine them, because it is constantly telling my computer they are being used.

So, obviously, this a cry for help. Has ANYONE out there run into anything similar, and if so, have you found a way to end it forever, or have you just learned to "live" with the pop-under meance?

1 Comments:

Blogger p. said...

(If you already did all these things forgive me for my condescending attitude.)

Okay step one - you know I don't use caps often as I believe the idea of yelling over the internet is dumb but...STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER. Please just try firefox for a couple days.

step two - make sure you have all MS updates installed. The new service pack is pretty good at detecting & stopping programs from sending info with out your consent.

step 3 - under the task manager check to see if there are any processes that are running that you don't recognize. Windows should stop you from stopping anything really important. Stop them and then run the spyware thing. This may or may not help.

step 4 - I think a lot of those spyware things have a option to run before windows starts. This way the processes can't be running first.

step 5 - Under Msconfig (start-run-msconfig) in startup see if there are any programs starting you don't know. I don't know if these programs will show up there but its worth a look.

8:37 AM  

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