About a week ago, I installed VMware on my Windows7. I did this to run Windows7 and Linux simultaneously as required in the NetTech Course-curriculum. However, when I installed VMware a Dangerous virus program disguising itself as an Anti-Virus program got installed. I had the VMware Setup in a pen-drive which was circulated among 3-4 colleagues before I used to setup on my system. Hence I am not sure where the virus came from!
It changed my Desktop Image; blocked all my programs and flashed a message - 'Your system has been attacked by viruses and trojans, please upgrade the anti-virus software'. I was surprised because I never installed an anti-virus since I first installed Windows7. The anti-virus program had blocked all other programs. I couldn't run any program and the anti-virus software took me to a webpage asking for my VISA-card credentials to get rid of the viruses found by the self proclaimed anti-virus program.
Since I was not able to run any program - I couldn't use task manager nor msconfig. So I restarted the system in Safe Mode. As expected the Virus (or the anti-virus software) didn't attack me this time. I used msconfig to check out all non-Microsoft services but when I restarted the system again, I found that the problem persisted! It was then that the System Restore feature in the Advanced Boot Options of Windows came to my rescue. I simply went back to a previous stage.
I clicked the following pics of the whole process (which was very painless and user-friendly):
I was glad to see the message after the process was completed which read - "System restore completed successfully. The system has been restored to 08-02-2011. Your documents have not been affected." I was glad to see this message, since I had moved a lot of files after installing VMware.
As for the anti-virus program and its cousin viruses, trojan and spyware - they were all gone! Now, I was able to run all the programs; and all this happened without any authentic ANTI-VIRUS program. I was reminded of the times when I used to format my system every now and then for such petty issues.
I installed licensed Windows7(from my MSDN Visual Studio Premium Subscription) on my new Laptop in June 2009. Since then I have never installed an anti-virus program nor have I formatted my system. I use multi-boot with the following Operating Systems:
- Windows7 Ultimate Edition
- Windows7 Ultimate N Edition
- Windows Web Server 2008
- Windows Server 2008
You know what's ironical? People still say -
- Windows in not secure!
- There's no recovery tool and system rollback for Windows!
No comments:
Post a Comment