April 5, 2006
It's been this way for a while
A Microsoft exec is saying that it's easier to nuke infected systems from orbit than to try and repair the OS installation. The reason he gives is that rootkits, the new weapon of choice for malware authors, are virtually if not actually undetectable, and there is no way to confirm whether or not they have actually been removed from your system.
I think this has actually been true for quite a while now, certainly long before the introduction of rootkits. Windows is a pretty opaque environment, and if something isn't working, there generally isn't a good way of figuring out why. Things incrementally get less and less stable, and cruft builds up in any Windows install. I generally reformat my drive about every 9 months as a matter of course, and I'm not even worried about virii.
This, of course, means that the OS is a fetid mass of donkey feces, but it's also the only thing that will run the software I want to run. I'm also more willing to spend 45 minutes reinstalling my OS every 6 months or so than spending hours and hours learning and relearning Linux.
But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
"I'm also more willing to spend 45 minutes reinstalling my OS every 6 months or so than spending hours and hours learning and relearning Linux."
That doesn't make much sense to me, Ryan. Linux isn't that hard to use, particularly (I would think) for you. Anyway, it's a good skill to have.
What kind of software do you need to run, anyway? Mac OS could probably run it, I would think, unless you're talking about games. But for those, pretty soon they'll be Virtual PC for the Intel Macs.
Posted by: Evan Donovan at April 7, 2006 10:15 AM