Paul Daniel's Views On The World, For What They're Worth

I suspect that, generally speaking, we all have a reasonably tarnished view of the Internet community. As consumers, we sit on the end of our blue cable or wireless link and have very little confidence that there’s too much good on the other side.

Well I have to say my faith has been somewhat restored in the last 48 hours!

Our rumpus room computer (not my laptop thankfully) got infected by the msword98.exe virus. This is an interesting little virus that unleashes a variety of other viruses on one’s computer and proves extremely difficult to remove. Because it is relatively new, my Trend Micro anti-virus software didn’t pick it up. My research suggested that none of the products out there was able to catch and resolve it.

So firstly, a big “you are freaking arseholes” to the morons who are out there creating these viruses. I don’t kid myself into thinking that will change anything, but it makes me feel slightly better.

In my attempts to get rid of the virus, I purchased a product called STOPzilla, whose developer claimed it would. It didn’t! And it ended up costing me about $50. I typed up an e-mail requesting a refund, not in my wildest dreams expecting to have any success. Well blow me down, I had a response within 24 hours advising me I would be getting a full refund. So to is3, while I wasn’t impressed with the false claims you made about your product, I was super-impressed with your customer service. Congratulations!

Having tried a few different things unsuccessfully, I finally decided to contact Trend Micro, the supplier of my anti-virus software. Once again, I didn’t expect to have a lot of success. Here was little ol’ home user me expecting to get a response out of a large corporate software developer. Well blow me down a second time, Trend Micro was absolutely brilliant. In a very responsive manner, they took me through the process of providing them with the relevant HijackIT and scan logs and how about this – within 2 ½ hours of me providing them with the logs (at 10:30am on a Saturday morning), they had sent me a file and the instructions on how to fix the problem. The first go wasn’t a complete success, but we nailed it on the second go, with a similar response time from Trend Micro. So to Michelle “Mike” Valeroso, Elmer Ted B. de los Reyes, Jan Acerbo and the whole Trend Micro team, I say thanks. You guys rock!