Eric's Beijing Diary

Oh, man! I hate viruses! I stupidly used my USB flash disk in the Internet bar in Langmusi, and picked up a host of viruses. One or more of them actually shut down my system. I couldn't boot windows. Today, Eason helped me to clean my hard drive and reinstall my operating system. In addition, I took the opportunity to install Kaspersky, the Russian anti-virus software. Up until now, I have used both Mcaffee and Symantec. Most recently, I have had Symantec on my system. But in China, Symantec is just not up to the job. Truthfully, I never used anti-virus software on my personal computer before I came to China. I rarely had trouble with viruses, because I just didn't let them in. But in China, it really is not possible to survive without it. So many systems in China are not protected. And they seem to be getting worse. Up until this year, I had never been hit with a virus less than two years old. But several of the viruses I got hit with now were first discovered several weeks ago.

Several months ago, I managed to get the Runauto folder virus from a local shop where I do my printing. (I know, I need to break down and buy a printer.) The Runauto folder virus is a Chinese virus that Symantec doesn't know about. It doesn't seem to do much, except that it creates a folder on your drive, which harbors other viruses that Symantec can see, but cannot delete. Maddening. I finally managed to find some information about it on a Chinese web site. I ran the page through the Babelfish translator to get the gist of the information, and did the fix myself. But it took me two or three days. I tell you, it's weird when you have a virus turning off your registry and your Task Manager. I would execute the command to reactivate them (a registry hack I found on the Internet), and the virus would turn them back off again. Really irritated me--that virus sitting there like a little demon laughing at me every time it reversed the command I had executed. But I finally managed to kill it. This time, I was not so lucky. But my students have been telling me I need to put Kaspersky on my system for some time, and I have been procrastinating. Still not sure if they like it so much because it is really that much better, or because they can go online and get free license keys. But they say it is more aware of Chinese viruses. We'll see.