The Spam Thread!

[RAMChYLD]

I don't know if she has moved again, but the last info I have is that she lives near Lake Ontario.

Well, I think she'll be fine. Lake Ontario is on the other side of New York.

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Believe it or not, New York is huge. The hurricane will likely hit the big city itself, but not the other part of New York. Lake Ontario is some 300 kilometers from the city(!).

That's the one inherent problem with the naming scheme of American towns - the state can be named after the city, and it may not necessarily be the same state where the city is in. For example, Washington DC (where the White House is) is actually across the continent from Seattle, Washington (home of Microsoft).

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Okay, so I found the root cause of Sally's corruption. The little rabblerouser is, unbelievably, Avast.

After restoring her ghost backup and running the updates about half a dozen times, I began to notice a pattern in that the corruption starts after Avast is updated to the newest version. On the 6th time I made the restore, I uninstalled Avast instead before running the updates. So far so good.

Then I took a System Restore snapshot, and proceeded to installed Avast. Sure enough, Hell broke lose.

To be doubly sure, I booted into safe mode, restored the snapshot, uninstalled Avast using the Avast Uninstall utility, and did a check disk to repair any damage Avast may have caused.

Sure enough, the corruption stopped.

I've fallen Sally back to my old stand-by, AVG. So far, so good. Apparently the latest update to Avast broke support for Windows XP Pro X64 edition. I should probably ask them on Facebook.

On the bootnote, the latest version of AVG has adopted the fugly Metro/Modern interface. Well, as long as that causes it to consume less memory, CPU and GPU power I guess.