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Hard drive so riddled with viruses, spyware and other crap that your computer’s practically unusable? Rather than invest hours into running antivirus scans and Registry edits, many people are taking the nuclear option: Throwing away the infected machines and buying new ones.
“I was spending time every week trying to keep the machine free of viruses and worms,” said Mr. [Lew] Tucker, a vice president of Salesforce.com, a Web services firm based here. “I was losing the battle. It was cheaper and faster to go to the store and buy a low-end PC.”
At first, it sounds daft to throw away something you probably paid a few hundred dollars for, and have loaded up with so much personal data. But really, people who take this route are making a decision based upon commitment: It’s worth the money to save their time and frustration in rehabbing a machine. Plus, considering their old system is likely less powerful than newer models, it’s a case of being spurred to make an upgrade that would have been necessary soon enough anyway. And obviously, prices are so low now (especially when it involves replacing just the CPU — the monitor and other peripherals can be retained) that it’s not a major investment for most folks.
The other thing factoring in here: Because people put so much personal info on their machines, it’s impractical to donate or sell them in order to get rid of them. Browser cookies and other files save things like Website passwords, Social Security numbers and less-vital-but-personal details. (Indeed, I found all that sort of stuff on that free computer I scooped up off a Craigslist ad; the people giving it away were simply careless, and could have gotten burned had someone more malicious gotten ahold of it.)If someone isn’t motivated enough to clean off the malware off the hard drive, they aren’t going to dig to try to remove all that critical information; if they were, they would go ahead and fix the whole thing, and then keep the computer. Trashing it is just easier all around.
Still, all this dumpster-filling seems like an awful waste. Here’s my offer: If you’re itching to rid yourself of that infested computer, send it my way. I’ll even pay the cost of shipping, provided it’s not unreasonable.
I’m loathe the throw away hardware. One computer of mine that I bought in 1999 just kicked the bucket. I spent two days trying to figure out if there was any way to revive an AMD K6-2 350! I guess that puts me on the opposite end of those folks. Part of me likes tinkering, though, especially when the stakes are small.
My most frequent advice to people on the subject of malware (great term!) is to always keep their data on a separate harddrive. The first sign of a problem you can’t fix in twenty minutes you should format and restore. With your personal data on another disk, you’re in pretty good shape with a minimum of virus scanning required.
Comment by trumwill — 07/16/2005 @ 6:38 PM
I can’t take credit for coining “malware” — it’s pretty widely used as a catchall for all the digital nasties out there.
Separate hard drive is a good idea, but far beyond the scope of an average user. People don’t even do backups, they’re not going to invest in more hardware; the setup alone is daunting enough.
Comment by CT — 07/16/2005 @ 7:15 PM
Of course, a HD saves money over buying new computers. While I do internal, external HDs are quite easy these days. But there is just a certain fear factor involved with that which doesn’t exist with buying a whole new machine.
Comment by trumwill — 07/17/2005 @ 1:03 AM