5. Setting Everything Up

To be honest with you, setting everything up these days is not as bad as it used to be. As much as I may be annoyed by the Windows XP features, setting up the operating system - even after a rebuild - is much easier than the old black and white days of starting off with DOS and upgrading your way to whatever was prevalent at the time. Out came the library of Windows 3.1 floppies and thus began a night of watching progress meters.

Nowadays things are faster. One flicks a few switches on XP, throws in a CD or two for office productivity software, and connects up the wireless and downloads one's favorite utilities. At the same time, an external backup hard drive transfers all the old files into familiar looking directories.

No major problems... until of course, a week later...

Just as I started settling in with my new notebook computer, all hell broke loose.

Trojan Writers: I'm Coming To Get You

Ohh ladi fu... da... what do you mean I can't swear on MobilityGuru? Fine. Damn ye, olde writers of viruses, Trojan pieces of code and malware, for I haveth been buggered royally in th... no, not acceptable either, then?

Well I'm sure all my dear readers can fill in the blanks by replacing my reaction to being hit by said naughty code with what they themselves thought when the same happened on their machines. We've all been there, though to be honest this is the first time that it ever happened to me within a week of getting the machine.

I usually advocate rebuilding every once in a while as a good way to keep the machine in tip-top shape and get rid of the extraneous crap that has built up on the hard drive. But it's just plain annoying when just after getting the machine, it's massacred by a missive from the Trojan boys.

Ohh well, rebuild Number 1, a week after getting the bloody thing.