Politics from the Palouse to Puget Sound

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Windows Home Server To the Rescue

For those who are techies you might enjoy this. For those who are not, you should listen in a little bit. First off, to make this a Scotty Rant, I have to say people who development spyware, viri (viruses)? , etc should be made to go down a slide covered in razors. Then dropped into a pool of lemon juice, some salt, and more. I cannot stand people who only seem to do things for the bad. I could go on, but this is actually a positive thing. Read on to get the good information...

I was working on getting some ideas for websites for restaurants. I pulled up my favorite search engine and typed in "restaurant websites". I clicked through about three of them. On the last one I noticed it loaded slowly. Then Acrobat tried to open. Soon my IE window died and threw an error. Every time I tried to open a new IE window the same thing.

No new programs would open up. So I rebooted my computer and everything worked again. All of a sudden AVG (my antivirus application) popped up that I had a virus. I started to look into that virus and it sounded bad. I didn't like that at all. In fact when I went to start to remove it via safemode, I wasn't able to open regedit. The majority of the virus related files were also not there to delete. That was worrisome.

I rebooted to Windows normally and those files appeared again. What a bummer. Really, I have heard others claim if you ever get hit with a big virus your best bet is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. With my setup, that would take about a good 20 hours in total. Not something I wanted to do.

But I have Windows Home Server. I just got it running a couple weeks ago. One thing it does is take an image of every hard drive I have in EVERY computer on my whole network. That means that if my hard drive ever dies it will take about thirty minutes to get back up and running.

I was able to use the same system to redo my hard drive. What that did was more or less take me to the time when I didn't have the virus at all. Within thirty minutes of starting the process I am on a machine that is virus free. No worries that the virus is still hanging on the system even though I thought I cleaned it.

As someone who use to repair computers for a living, this is a HUGE time savings. I just don't know if I can sing enough praises for Windows Home Server. It also backs up my personal data nightly. It will do many other things, but those were the two big ones for me.

Because of Windows Home Server Scotty is a very happy man right now!

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