firewall trouble

[Preferred User]

I'm at Short Media when I get a tough spyware problem. Good site. Lately though, when I start with one that I know is a spyware mess, I tell the owner that I'll work on it for an hour...then we'll sit down and talk about how to proceed. I've gotten into too many of those where I'm 4 hours into it and have no idea how long it's going to take....or how the damaged op sys will run when I'm done. I tend to be much quciker to advise a total rebuild these days. When I spend 9 hours on a machine that is worth $300, I end up throwing in free time. I don't like free time.

 

[mindido]

Preferred User,

I'm pretty much the same with a heavily infected machine. An hour is enough for me to have a good idea of the trade off between repartitioning and reformatting or trying to get rid of the crap. In fact, in most cases, I just tell the customer its best to just r&r because its about the only way I can guarantee the machine will be clean when I'm done. Its 6 or 8 hours to r&r (generally) or 4 or 5 (at least) to clean the machine (hopefully) with no guarantee.