How to Crash Your PC – Part 3
Posted by jon in Windows, tags: habit, spyware, virus, Vista, XP
BECOME A “CLICK FIEND”
I was at a client’s office the other day when I noticed an error message pop-up on the receptionist’s desktop. Before I could even get a look at it, she clicked “OK” and the message disappeared. I asked her what that was and she said “I don’t know. Stuff like that comes up all the time. I just click ‘OK’.” Needless to say, I was not amused that this apparently had been going on for sometime and that I had not been notified about it. She responded that her PC at home does the same thing, she just thought it was normal.
Messages from your PC mean something. Sometimes they indicate a problem, sometimes they just notify you of what’s going on in your PC. In the case above, the dialog message she received was warning her that that the hard drive (where all you data is actually stored) was beginning to fail, of course it wasn’t in plain English so she didn’t know that. My point is, to simply dismiss a dialog without reading the content can be extremely dangerous.
Another case of “click fiendery” came in the form of a user running as an administrator, who answered “yes” or “OK” to seemingly every message he received from the Internet. This included ads from webpages that told him “You may have a virus. Click here to check.” This action installed malicious software (a virus) that then pestered him continually with pornography and ads on how to remove the offensive software, for a price. His excuse was that he was just tired of having to answer dialog boxes all the time. Just so you know, he was running anti-virus software already, but even that won’t prevent every bad thing that can happen to your PC.
The problem has gotten so bad that studies are being conducted to see just how gullible the average user is. You can bet your spyware and virus writers will be happy to get that information.
Unfortunately, it seems that the dialog box is overused in today’s programs. Even I myself, fail to understand why, when installing the latest large software company’s product, I have to answer questions repeatedly during the install. One would think that all the questions about where and what to install could go at the beginning of the install. So we become perturbed, and we click wildly to get the dialogs to go away so we can get back to our work. I understand your frustration, I really do.
The solution though is quite simple. SLOW DOWN. Easy for me to say, I’m not on a deadline right now. But the truth is, it’s become necessary for us to take a moment and actually READ the message we’re being given, then to apply some common sense to it.
YOU MAY HAVE A VIRUS. CLICK HERE TO CHECK. “Do I already have anti-virus software? Does this look like my anti-virus message?”
THE DEVICE DISKS/HARDDISK0 HAS ENCOUNTERED A HARD ERROR AND DATA WAS LOST “What data was lost? Is my stuff backed up? Maybe I should call someone who knows what this means.”
So the next time you ‘re presented with a dialog box and a message you weren’t expecting, take the time to read and understand it, or you may find yourself with plenty of time to think about it while your PC is getting repaired.
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