I’ve had to work at various workstations for the past few weeks. Omigod, what people do to their computers! Our entire tech staff at work - for three sites - consists of one woman who also has to function as office manager at our location since cutbacks earlier this year. She must be tearing her hair out. There’s no way she has the time or the technical resources to completely monitor what people download onto their computers. Considering that, she keeps the virus count fairly low and it’s a miracle.

The first of the computers I “borrowed” has something pop up each day offering free photos from Webshots. Why in the world would you want that to happen? If you want the photos, I’d figure you’d go get them. I’m not saying that Webshots doesn’t give away nice stuff. I’m sure they do. That’s not the point. Do you really want to be nagged about it when you’re busy composing a report - or checking out Ebay on company time?

That was nothing, though. That computer is in pretty good shape. If you open a web browser on most of them, you get about half the screen because the top half is taken up with various toolbars, some of which have been installed without the user understanding what happened. I’m not talking about a Google toolbar, or even Yahoo. More often there were both of those plus obscure ones that are pretty redundant if you have one, let alone, both of the former installed. The last one had the toolbars and all kinds of windows popping up, no doubt because of some kind of malware that’s found its way onto the computer. Maybe she ran into something like the adware served by Ethernet Media, until it was shut down by the courts. Apparently it offered an “upgrade” to your browser and instead installed adware on it, as explained by Blog Herald.

Another announced a long list of virii, dating back months, when I logged on. Its usual user had never bothered to either notify anyone or to remove them herself.

And these people wonder why their machines are running slowly. Of course, it’s a mystery to me why management doesn’t just ask people to use a browser other than Internet Explorer. What the attachment to it is, I’ll never know. When there’s such a simple solution to something, it’s hard to understand not using it. When my sister’s computer got itself some kind of unasked for “feature” that was rendering the computer fairly uselss, after spending some time getting rid of it, I downloaded Netscape for her. I thought Firefox would confuse her. She was computer-phobic, but it’s getting a little better. She was able to use Netscape easily and has had no problems with the computer since then.

I wouldn’t go as far as putting Explorer Destoyer on a site of my own. That seems a bit extreme and kind of rude. But I’d sure like to see someone take steps to curtail the abuse of innocent computers.