2009-11-24 14:41:06

Well, Here's an interesting tale to tell.

yesterday, like a complete and utter prat I got a virus.

tere is nobody to blame for this but my complete bone headed stupidity.

Sinse I've got a lot of spam of late, I've been setting up male rules to dispose of it, ---- things like automatically moving anything with viagra in the subject line to the  deleted items folder.

I'd just read and deleted a message, and then thought better of replying, so went to the deleted items folder and like a total zombi just pressed enter on the first message presuming it was the ast one I deleted.

No such luck! my rules had worked, and I was opening a pandora's box of spam!

Needless to say, I closed it quickly, -----and hoped it was just spam advertising.

No such luck, sinse quite soon windows was popping up security alerts.

So, I downloaded the free version of Avg.

this was an interesting exercise in itself, sinse Ie had been envirusated and wouldn't let me find the link, ---- so I had to connect my laptop to the net, find the link, E-mail it to myself and open that E-mail on my desktop(i certainly wasn't going to use my backup external drive when my desktop had a known virus).

So I downloaded and ran avg a few times.

Previously Avg got right up my nose, ---- not for it's lack of virus squashing ability (though it did for some odd reason decide that Klango was a virus), but for the amount it slowed my computer up when it decided in it's infinite wisdom to scan or update, ---- which it insisted upon doing at every! oppertunity!

It was most annoying to have my computer slow to a crawl when I first turned it on to the point where Hal wasn't working properly and I couldn't even word process for my thesis for a couple of hours while Avg checked my C drive and updated it's deffinitions.

I had in the end to uninstall the thing just so that I could get things done, ---- and decided it wasn't worth the bother, and to stick with spybot for add and spyware (though it's manual updating is a major task!), and take my chance with viruses by careful brousing, ---- sinse generally after many years, I've found unless you open dodgy E-mails or download dodgy links, you don't have to be as paranoid about viruses as some people are.

Now however, Either Avg is more relaxed, or this pc has a good wodge more ram than my last, sinse I haven't noticed Avg imparing performance significantly at all.

If it continues not to be a pain, I might considder subscribing when the month of free license runs out, ---- sinse as I said, Spybot's manual update system is a pest, ---- as each component, ---- add deffinitions, security protocalls etc has to be downloaded  and installed separately, ---- and it's nearly as much of a pest determining which bits are actually needed by spybot (obviously updated german language files aren't), as it would be  removing  a serious virus.

I can also say, that sinse Avg's background scanner picked up the virus even before I started a general C drive scan, ---- I know it's not going to crash my computer at start up by conflicting with Hal the way Macaffi did when i was  living in Colidge.
Not sure why I'm sharing this, ---- accept it's a vaguely interesting litle tale, --- and some people may have thoughts on avg and slowdown.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-24 19:54:39

I had previously got it set up on my mother's computer and it did indeed slow it down quite a lot. I haven't direct experience of it personally, but my mother's not the most technical of users to say the least so if she noticed it then it must be bad.

Personally I'm sticking with Nod32. It has a good reputation for catching viruses, apparently it hasn't missed a single "in the wild" virus yet and is almost immune to "false positives". It is also designed to have an absolute minimum impact on system performance.

I have to admit though I've been able to run for ages without an antivirus program and not get any significant issues. My sister on the other hand spent a couple of years with way out of date antivirus, both because noone was willing to pay for it and because she was very very resistant to actually doing anything such as installing an updated antivirus program and she got virused up to the eyeballs. I think our IP got put on a spam list thanks to that, and she still hasn't learned her lesson. The only reason I got any kind of updated antivirus on there was when I got a 3-license pack of Norton, which I used back then, and bugging her repeatedly to put one of them on her laptop.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-11-24 20:39:14

Well, as I said, i've got on fine without an antivirus just by being careful for a while, ---- but as I had to fix this immediate issue, I needed one in a hurry.

Norton is apparently very annoying to use with screen readers these days, ---- and sinse I already knew Avg's layout it made sense to use that one.

I might have a look at nod32 if Avg does turn out to slow down performance as it did before. Does nod32 also cover spyware, addware and rootkips?

Amusingly this afternoon, my keyboard response slowed down a lot and started missing keystrokes.

"here we go" I thought, ---- until I found the wire with the sensor for my wireless keyboard had fallen down the back of my shelf, ---- grin!

Your sister needs to meet my dad. He's managed to virus about four different computers in his time, ---- especially because he stil thinks he's on a dile up connection and looks for the litle bt connect icon to get on the net!

He also doesn't know the meaning of alt F4. On one occasion, he said a pop up saying "install protection now!" appeared, ---- and he clicked okay!

On another, a popup appeared, and he attempted to click cancel, ---- but like all dodgy popups the buttons weren't labled correctly, so he managed to install some amazingly weerd addware which popped flashing add panels all over the place!

I'm almost tempted to buy him a copy of avg net security for christmass, and set it up on insane security with messages saying "press alt F4 now or you will be exterminated!"

Accept that he insists he doesn't use the internet for anything, ---- and so wouldn't need an antivirus, ---- despite his wonderful ability to explode computers on a regular basis.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-24 21:58:33

lol oh good grief.

Nod32 covers adware and so on, but there is also Eset smart security made by the same people. It is basically Nod32 with firewall, antispam and everything else you could possibly want rolled together. Basic nod32 though still has an option to scan for "potentially unsafe" and "potentially unwanted" programs.

On an unrelated note I found this on youtube:
it is pitch dark
Not to my tastes, but amusing that someone went to the effort.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-11-25 14:26:58

Good grief Cx2! you've done something impossible, ---- found a gangster rap I actually like!

I've been a fan of epic metal for a while, ---- but this is ridiculous!

Stil, I think I'm going to have the phrase

"you! are likely to be eaten by a greue! if this predicament seems particularly cruel! considder who! 's fault it could be, neither torch nor a match in your in ven tor ree!"

Stuck in my head for ages now!

laugh!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-25 15:57:36

lol happy to be of service. That said as amusing as the thought was I still can't stand even that gangster rap.

Never thought of you as a metal fan, curious how people make assumptions about each other like that.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-11-25 18:29:18

i wouldn't say I'm so much a fan of any particular genre of music so much as of music which has a certain interesting character.

For a long time, I thought good music had to have an orchestra. Then when i got to uni, I met a lot of prog rock friends who liked a variety of weerd stuff.

Now, I have a music collection which goes from chikovski, and Gilbert and sullivan ANDREW LOYDE WEBBER AND DYSNIES TO Pink floyde, king crimson and leonard cohen, ---- though I'll freely admit all my metal/rock knolidge comes from me saying "I like that, ---- what is it?" TO MY FRIENDS.

i ALSO OF COURSE LOOK FOR STUFF WHICH i WANT TO SING, ---- AND SINGING WISE i'M GENERALLY A SEMI-CLASSICAL TENOR, --- THOUGH i VERY MUCH AM NOT A FAN OF OPERA OWING TO THE LACK OF CLARITY IN THE VOICES OF MOST OPERA SINGErs.

epic metal is amusing though. How about a full rock ballad with thundering guitars about the ancient forest of elves?

Or an album which tells in song a very anime like dying planet and prophecies fullfilled story?

It's just cool!

See if you can find anything on Prophet of the last eclipse and luca turilli.

EPIC METAL

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-25 18:49:04

Well, I'm going to comment on both topics that have sprung up here. It's quite fun to have 2 topics going on at once, but not for ages though.
To the first one:
I think AVG is ok, but there are 2 annoying things about it:
The first one is that it has deleted both knight of paracite and the old klango, so no pirate memory game for me, and no hope of ever getting past chapter 2 in nop.
The second on is that when it's scanning (a full blown scan), hal slows down very slightly, it slows down the system a bit too, but it's not unbarable. It's annoying though. I usually get my dad to scan the pc once a week or so, and plus, avg's background scanner does a nice job without making the pc slow down.
To the second topic:
Dark, have you seen the various star wars gangster raps availalbe? they're funnyas heck. Just search for star wars rap on youtube, you'll laugh.
Also, for a laugh at something computer related, have you checked out all the windows remixes? there's loads of mixes! just type windows remix and you'll be laughing soon enough. Some of them are very catchy, you'll never think of windows error sounds the same way again!
That's my 2 sence on both topics.

2009-11-25 20:15:22

And sinse your in England, ---- your two sense must be very hard to come by indeed, --- grin!

As I said, this wasn't intended to be a serious topic, just a general chat, so I don't particularly care where it goes.

I've heard some starwars raps, but most tend to be a bit too crass for my liking, ---- This one though i thought was hilarious, ---- particularly darth and palpatine at the start!

I've not noticed avg's scanner, ---- or indeed it's updating slowing Hal down on my deaktop at the moment, in fact to make absolutely certain that irritating virus was got rid of I ran about 4 consecutive scans while playing core exiles and entombed. As I said though, the ram on this desktop is fairly decent, ----unlike my old machine which had the horrendous trouble, and even if I decide to buy avg, I probably won't bother with my laptop.

Interestingly enough, Avg is the antivirus Dolphin recommend as most Hal friendly, which is why I looked into getting it when I moved out of colidge and wanted one (the university had well and truly put me off Mcaffi, ---- which managed to crash my laptop!), I've not particularly tried many though, ----but I'm not really bothered about viruses enough to spend too much time on this, so I'll probably only do something else if Avg proves to be a pest.

Night of parasite I'm not sure about, ---- but I did inform Klango about the avg issue and they said they'd see about contacting avg.

I need to install the Klango environment myself to check out the games for audiogames.net, ---- so if I run into trouble then I'll get back in touch with them, sinse obviously that's quite an issue.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-26 00:25:40

Interesting. I've tried a few epic metal things on youtube and one or two have potential, though most admittedly don't fit my tastes. I've got to confess I also like music for certain characteristics, but I'm beggared if even I know what they are half the time. My very small music collection includes such incongruous artists as John Barrowman, Evanescence and Midnight Syndicate lol.

I do oddly tend to find I like soundtrack stuff a lot though, especially as background music since there aren't vocals to distract me while I'm doing something else.

Regarding AVG I do recall hearing mention that Nop was coming up as a false positive, I've scanned the old installer with Nod32 (never got to trying the game though for some reason) and it comes out clean.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-11-26 04:41:09

I've not seen nop bought up by avg over here, ---- but then again, when I tried to play nop I got an error message (one I couldn't read being as it was in chinese), so maybe if I install it and it works correctly I'll get the avg false positive then.
I do hope however Klango sorted their trouble with avg out. one of the Klango team told me they'd contact avg to get Klango registered as a safe application, ----- but I'm not sure where this went.

Epic metal's like many things, ---- some good and some bad. Thus far Luca Turrelli is a personal favourite, but I've heard stuff I like less. funny you mentioning John barroman though.

Being both a fan of doctor who and torchwood, ---- I always think of someone who can flirt with people of both genders while having dallek guns pointed at him, ---- lol!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-26 08:56:44

Well he'd been on Paul O'Grady with his album, and my sister watches it religiously. He seemed a really nice bloke - confident without being macho and a good sense of humour. He also had quite a voice. They even had him and Paul trying to make Fern Brittan, the other guest that day, laugh while reading a fake news show. They arranged it so that every time she laughed they would deduct money from this meter and what was left would go to charity, since she used to be a news reader apparently. Really funny, I might have to dig it up on youtube some time. It had everything from genetically modified farm animals revolting to the weather in the arctic being affected by global warming.

He is pretty good as Jack Harkness though. Always fun when he shows up.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-11-26 10:28:46

Some of my friends from my roleplay group saw him in concert, which must've been good. As far as captain jack goes, ---- -well though Torchwood seemed to reach a perminant end, I'm rather hoping that he'll be back in doctor who with the eleventh Doctor, sinse it'd be sad if he wasn't included in the series, ----- and given his current status, he should be around a long time yet!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-26 14:05:25

I will say this, and only this.
The darkness holds only one thing: the end of time itself.

2009-11-26 15:35:01

Didn't that happen already?

I think their running out of similar phrases for the titles of Dr. who series ending episodes. So far we've had parting of the ways, doomsday, journey's end, --- not to mention end of days for the last episode of torchwood series one, ---- and at a stretch you might include the series two finale exit wounds as well.

Now we've got "the end of time"

I think at some point we're going to have a doctor who entitled "yes, this is the end! ---- no really! absolutely the end! --- no I mean it this time, it is the end! ---- of course I really mean it, --- this is deffinately, and absolutely the end! ---- why don't you believe me you crettin! it is the end! you fool!"

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-26 22:04:48

Either that or "The end of doomsday prophecies" laugh.

I have to agree about Jack, he's a good character and it would be a shame for him to fall by the wayside.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-11-26 23:47:28

Well, technically jack has already fallen by the wayside in gridlock, ---- but sinse that takes place in the year 1 million or so, he'll have plenty of time in the series up to then.

There were also some potentially very interesting plot hooks setup throughout season 4, which will be interesting to see if they come off or not.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-27 00:17:06

I meant falling by the wayside as in being forgotten about rather than just falling. I imagine they'll probably tie up the plotline from Gridlock eventually anyway, though I hope not for a long time.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-11-27 05:50:15

Well, sinse that was obviously a far future, ---- and far older version of Jack, heck, he was a face in a jar by that point, --- and you didn't find out that was jack until the end of the series anyway, ---- there's plenty for him to do in the mean time, and judging by the end of torchwood, he's busy wandering the galaxy now, ---- though if torchwood continues (which I admit is quite an if), we'll have to see if Jack returns for it or not.

Then of course there's the question of how Jack got to be a face in a jar in the year 1 million anyway, ---- and more importantly, ---- why he suddenly lost his american accent? Grin!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-11-27 13:46:54

aah yes, the face of boe. yes, i do wonder, indeed. What happened to him -- how jakc became the face of boe.
I have heard some very exciting roomers regarding the 2 part special this year, one of them is just, well, it has me wondering if it will happen. They say it might be a spoiler, and i don't know whether to say it here, because if it comes true, well... wait, i might have said too much.