Vintage Virus

[nymetropolitans]

I dug out a pile of 3.5" floppies that haven't seen the light of day in about a decade and started popping them into my fancy "new" fresh from the trash Pentium. I haven't owned a computer with a FDD in many, many years so I was curious to see what was on them. Sure enough on a disk labeled "RAMPAGE" (which I'm pretty sure was a DOS port of the arcade game Rampage) whatever old version of Norton Antivirus is on this computer found a "Stoned.Empire" virus right away and killed it. I was pretty amused that a virus from 1991 still lived on one of my floppy disks. That's the first virus I've gotten infected with this decade!

http://www.computerhope.com/monkey.htm

[chuckcmagee]

Good thing you had Norton on the machine. Stoned is a very mean virus. It picks up your partition table and moves it a few sectors down. Really hard to fix the damage once infected if you don't have some virus cleaning software.

I know all about that virus as I was looking at how it worked (back in 1992) and forgot and let the diskette in the drive. Sure enough, next day I turn on the machine and ZAP, got me. Of course, I was kicking myself, I couldn't believe that I had left the diskette in the drive!!

[nymetropolitans]

Good thing you had Norton on the machine. Stoned is a very mean virus. It picks up your partition table and moves it a few sectors down. Really hard to fix the damage once infected if you don't have some virus cleaning software.

I know all about that virus as I was looking at how it worked (back in 1992) and forgot and let the diskette in the drive. Sure enough, next day I turn on the machine and ZAP, got me. Of course, I was kicking myself, I couldn't believe that I had left the diskette in the drive!!

I almost removed Norton from that computer, too. On all my modern PCs the anti-virus software has become so ridiculously bloated and memory hungry....and I haven't been infected with one in soooo long, I've just said screw it and run without it. Very glad that old copy of Norton was quietly doing it's job, not annihilating system resources!!

[dongfeng]

I almost removed Norton from that computer, too. On all my modern PCs the anti-virus software has become so ridiculously bloated and memory hungry....and I haven't been infected with one in soooo long, I've just said screw it and run without it. Very glad that old copy of Norton was quietly doing it's job, not annihilating system resources!!

That's a very silly thing to do...

Personally I prefer to use AVG Free Edition, a very nice and system friendly anti-virus - but best of all it is free!

[nymetropolitans]

That's a very silly thing to do...

Personally I prefer to use AVG Free Edition, a very nice and system friendly anti-virus - but best of all it is free!

That's what I use too, and it's by far the best IMHO, but the newest versions seem to have a problem with A) anything less than 256MB of RAM and B) Windows 2000. I have 2 PCs that fit that description so I just let them slide without it. Last time I even saw a virus with my own two eyes (before finding these floppies!) was sometime in the late 90s haha.

[TroyW]

That's a very silly thing to do...

Personally I prefer to use AVG Free Edition, a very nice and system friendly anti-virus - but best of all it is free!

I agree, very risky and silly thing to do. I use AVG 8 here too and personally don't have a problem with it at all, and can't beat the price of the free edition :)

[nymetropolitans]

I agree, very risky and silly thing to do. I use AVG 8 here too and personally don't have a problem with it at all, and can't beat the price of the free edition :)

Definitely. Under XP, it'll never use more than 10MB of memory either....I can't figure out for the life of me what it's problem with Win2k is. Eats up as much RAM as the entire operating system install does!

[TroyW]

Yeah, although I have to say I'm disappointed with the performance of the Resident Shield portion compared to the 7.x version (had to tell it to not scan a few folders I regularly open in explorer that contain many thousands of files, because it would slow my PC to a crawl while browsing those folders), which performed much better in my experience, and the entire interface seems a little sluggish compared to the 7.x version.

Still, for a free version, can't complain, as long as it does the job, those are minor quibbles. :)

[Yzzerdd]

I use AVG Free, too! I see viruses ALL THE TIME, but I run a business in which one of my callings is fixing virus-infested (and spyware, too) computers. I always install AVG Free onto them and dump McAfee. 3/4ths the time they say "Well I have McAfee" and then I say "Sure, but you haven't updated it/paid supcription in 4 years either."

I personally have no problems running it on my 128MB 2K Pro Dell Precision 410 at all. I just disable the link scanner and resident shield as well as one or two other things I can deal without and it runs like a charm.

Never seen a vintage virus, but I have multiple older virus protection programs.

--Jack

[Mike Chambers]

I use AVG Free, too! I see viruses ALL THE TIME, but I run a business in which one of my callings is fixing virus-infested (and spyware, too) computers. I always install AVG Free onto them and dump McAfee. 3/4ths the time they say "Well I have McAfee" and then I say "Sure, but you haven't updated it/paid supcription in 4 years either."

I personally have no problems running it on my 128MB 2K Pro Dell Precision 410 at all. I just disable the link scanner and resident shield as well as one or two other things I can deal without and it runs like a charm.

Never seen a vintage virus, but I have multiple older virus protection programs.

--Jack

avg free is an awesome virus app! i don't use any virus protection on my main PC. i probably should, but i don't want it to eat my CPU cycles.