Linux vs Windows - Conquering a Windows Based World

If anyone works with computers and your neighbors, friends, relatives realize this, you will be all too familiar with this scenario. Phone rings “Hi this John Doe, something strange is happening with my computer can you take a quick look at it“. You will become the geeksquad for problems that occur on their PC’s. I am not complaining I don’t mind helping, when someone is in need. But recently it is becoming more and more difficult to remove Windows spyware and viruses that get installed on the machines. It used to be as simple as running Adaware or Spybot Search and destroy and tweeking 1 or 2 entries in the registry. Takes a half hour or so, catch up on old times, have a beer, and the world makes sense again. Sometimes I recommend buying Spyware Doctor from http://www.pctools.com/ and all is good.

However, its just not that easy anymore, and fixing a virus infected computer can take 2 or 3 hours. This does not even ensure a clean running PC. My latest and current battle is with a virus called “antispywaresoldier”. None of the current tools were able to eradicate it from IE. My fallback solution was to install FireFox and recommend they don’t use IE. That’s not even a fix, but it was 11:00 PM and I wanted to get home and go to sleep. By the way, if anyone has recommendations on how to get rid of this one, please post a comment in the blog, because I would love to hear about it.

Anyway, the point of the matter is. Will there soon be a time when the best solution is to start from scratch and reinstall whole OS and Apps on 6 month old PC. If this is the case, then there has to be something better. I am still not convinced that Linux is best solution for average Home computer user. Maybe one day it will, but at this present time the only alternative is to fight the “good fight” with the viruses. But I can see that I am in a loosing battle, and it will be a war of attrition.