SecuRom is unintentionally a virus.
It's retail stuff that sony made and gave to EA.
It increased my desktops bootup time from 10 seconds to 5 minutes
It made my computer slow down to a crawl and it constantly blue screened.
Now, imagine having to deal with that for 6 months and have that be your only computer.
Trust me, I tried every loving possible method.
I tried to:
Erase it manually
Erase it manually from a live cd.
Use chkdsk to repair it (It found it but it couldn't repair it, note that i have no windows dvd to test this on at the time)
Scanned it using every possible legit program known to man.
after 6 months i finally found the install and drivers dvd for the dell.
i started reinstalling vista faster then you can say forget.
now the computer takes under 30 seconds from bios to being able to actually use your computer with every startup program loaded.
and everything is happy again. story 2 time.
short story:
i had a virus on my old laptop which forced me into linux.
i decided to boot up my laptop in windows mode and finally cleaned up the virus for 2 hours.
and everything was great after that...
then i ran windows update and installed updates and on reboot: BSOD on bootup.
safe mode failed to work and after research:
ALL OF THESE BLUE SCREENS RELATE TO THE VIRUS I HAD AND I HAVE TO REINSTALL VISTA TO RECOVER FROM THIS!
how about what i did: give vista the middle finger and start contemplating lubuntu before i even get to install it (still havent to this day)
story 3 and final
this is yesterday in fact, norton found 300 viruses (not my computer and not my dumbness) and it recommended to delete them all.
some of these viruses are infected critical system drivers. (not that critical as in unable to boot into safe mode)
i did a whole lot of stuff that i wont even bother mentioning them all.
tried sfc /scannow and that failed for some reason.
the system repair bullstuff suggested system restore which i clicked yes on.
didn't work.
i ran driver verifier and it required a restart into normal mode.
restarted.
and finally, i got into the desktop.
problem solved, right?
NO
it was so sluggishly slow that it wasnt even usable.
after a lot of stuff later.
i forgot that i ran system restore and i ran it again and system restored again, restarted into safe mode before system restoring for safety reasons.
one restart later...
everything was back to normal and then i realized i had ran it once.
moral of this story: windows gives you all of these troubleshooting tools but 99.9% of them don't work and that norton is stuff.
