Remilia Scarlet

This morning the internet decided to stop working in my room. Figuring it was just their server again, I left for school. But what did I find in my mailbox when I got there? A slip saying I was disconnected from the network due to the possibility of my laptop picking up a virus recently, and asking me to bring it in so they could fix it. Ok, two things here:

1. It doesn't have a virus. The incident that probably got them to notice me was when I installed a program accidentally that had somewhere around 100 pieces of adware/spyware in it (eh, not downloading from that site again). Well, I quickly ran three seperate Adware/Spyware removal tools using their deep scan options and removed all of the culprits. Then I even ran Hijack This! and manually removed a few more questionable entries. THEN I updated my virus definitions and ran a full computer scan. Know what? No virus on it that I can tell.

2. I don't care if the computer I own is a freshly installed system which I had used for a total of one minute. I don't like people screwing with my computer since you never know when they might screw it up. If anyone's going to fuck it over, it'll be me.

So this is what I did...first, I went in and tried explaining to them that I ran all those cleaning programs and they didn't come up with anything. Didn't matter, still had to bring it in. So then I told them that I deleted Windows and only had Linux on it (not quite true, but read on...). Didn't matter, still had to bring it in. At this time, I returned to my dorm, rebooted into Linux, logged in, and changed something. Know what I changed? /etc/lilo.conf, removing the lines that let my bootloader even recognize that Windows is installed on my system. Then for safety, I removed the directory /mnt/windows. The result? Doesn't look like I have Windows anymore, now does it? There are probably some more hints that it's still on there, but not many.

So I brought it back to the computer lab here. This time a girl was working and helped me out (she understood english better and I might add was alot more friendly). I explained to her that I had cleaned Windows, but then just got rid of it, leaving only Linux. She went and called the main computer guy, but when she came back she said she still had to go take it to get scanned. That's when I realized something: it's password protected. Well, I let her know my login and password...but not to root. Just my normal user name. So, no access into the heart of the OS. I sure as hell wasn't going to give them my root password.

Oh yes, I should mention that my installation of Linux doesn't even boot up into a graphical environment or desktop. Straight to the command-line. So we'll see how this plays out. I want to know what exactly they're scanning for in Linux...

And actually...even if they know how to do startx, I think I need to reinstall my nVidia driver (long, complicated story, don't ask...probably not what you think)...so they might not be able to...