My girlfriends mom asked whether I could fix her coworkers laptop. She claimed that it had viruses installed and laptop is laggy..

So... I got that laptop just now, got home and turned it on. It doesn't have WiFi drivers installed and I do not have any free Ethernet cable right now.

About the lags... Well you won't believe how many custom tool bars and security programs there were. McAffe, AVG, ESET and some Russian made firewall which asks for license key every 5mins.

And she asked me to reinstall windows and keep every file of hers, and she didn't bother to point which files of 300gb of photos/videos/docs are worth keeping and which are not.. HDD is 300GB :A fuck me

P. S. Since it's my first rant I can say ranting helps a lot to calm down

ESET Antivirus is a strange animal. On one hand, it seems reasonably well written, because unlike Norton or F-Secure, it doesn't subject your computer to death by constant disk access and 100% CPU load for 10 minutes when you start it.

On the other hand, when I clicked the link in the mail about renewing licenses and filled out the form, I was not redirected to a page where I could enter credit cart details.

Instead, I got message that some representative would get back to me in 1-2 work days. Eh, what? It's a digital product for f***'s sake. Now, I suppose they'll send me a hand written letter (written using a quill, no doubt), delivered by a bloke riding a horse and wearing a tricorn.

Well, at least ESET virus definition updates are pushed on the internet, and not sent out on 5.25" diskettes.

Battling our contracted IT guys about forcing ESET antivirus onto all of our machines. Just looked at Task Manager to find that it was using 1.6+ GB of RAM on my machine! grrrr !!!!!

how do i click here? 😂 link seems broken

btw is a manual.. printed in paper

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

I got a new phone, and there is an option in the settings to disable notifications for specific apps. Of course, to prevent overload from apps.
The problem is that the apps that actually spam me:
Bloatware "antimalware" wants to be activated (I have eset on my phone and thats probably better than a random bloatware) and Samsungs integrated file manager "My files" (I have es installed anyways and its better than the bloatware. Im sure I use it.)
Their notifications just cant be turned off fully. Instead I only have the option to "hide them on lockscreen".
Nice, except the lockscreen is the only place my notifications actually dont show up. Even when I want to, it just doesnt work.
The teams making apps should actually read the docs of other projects, as this is just massivly uninformed development.