Salem Beats
Ki from Salem-Beats.com
If you are at all comfortable with computers [...]
I've spent quite a bit of my time doing computer programming as a hobby. I spent 2 years in tech school doing it as well. I placed #6 in a statewide programming competition, and #2 in another statewide robotics competition. The HTML for my company's website is hand-coded. I developed a full set of Lua scripts for my Logitech G13 so that it can assist me with my DAW workflow. I've installed various Linux distros and continue to use them (as a power user with the UNIX command line) when I need to. I've written scripts for my friend adding bot and scheduled tasks with the command line to automate its process every day -- I even came up with a workaround for the memory leak in its embedded IE browser. I run a rooted Android phone. I hand-chose the services that I will and will-not run on my Windows machine in order to optimize my computer's DAW performance without disabling anything system-critical.
I'm not trying to brag; I'm simply letting you know that besides music, computers are my passion. I'm likely one of the most computer-literate users you'll find on the FP forums.
If you are at all comfortable with computers you will never get a virus... unless someone is trying to say hack into your bank account information or maybe you harbor nuclear launch codes or something.... but if you are not a high risk target and you know how to operate a computer well viruses really are not an issue.
Even with all of this experience backing me, I couldn't tell you with any certainty whether you have a virus or not. Some viruses don't seem to do much. Some look for stored credit card information while you sleep. I recall one virus in particular that made me laugh because it always crashed after a few seconds. Some just slow you down a bit, and little-by-little your computer becomes gradually encumbered by a bunch of extra processes who consume processor cycles and RAM, but since your computer loses its performance gradually from one month to the next, you don't realize how sub-optimally your system is running.
Think about this: Computer software exists that can break the copy protection in Windows. Computer viruses exist that can evade and disable antivirus software. If these things are possible, don't you think that a virus can break (and impersonate) your monitoring tools as well? I have been a victim of imposter "explorer.exe", "regedit.exe", and "taskmgr.exe" files several times in the past, and I'm certain that I've fallen victim to some much more sophisticated rootkits and the like as well. Sure, everything may look great when you try to check out your computer processes, files, and the registry, but how do you know that you can trust what you see?
So long as you use pirated software, you have to wonder whether every system hiccup is caused by a virus.
-Ki
Salem Beats
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