I was around at my inlaws house last weekend and was asked to have a look at their PC as it was playing up. They have AOL and seemingly they were getting a ton of pop-ups. I knew that AOL has some pop-ups but not a ton of them so I booted up and logged on to AOL and had a little surf…. There was tons of pop-ups. I had a look at the processes running and low and behold, I spotted Blaster.exe or something similar. I knew then that the PC was probably riddled with all sorts of trojans ad spyware and what have you. I ran Symatec's removal tool for Blaster and then installed AVG Free (from grisoft). I ran the complete test and it found 35 infected files….. sheesh. I have left it running in the background so hopefully they won't get any more.

Last week I started using BitTorrent and came across the Linspire Live CD iso image. I downloaded and burnt to disk. I booted from the CD  with no problems and had a look around and the application list is quite comprehensive. I then thought I'd try my Thumbdrive to see if it found that… Yup and I could write to it (I could not in Knoppix). I then tried my new external hard drive … Yup it found that too and could write to it (Knoppix could not). I then tried my iRiver hard disk  MP3 player…. Yup found it and could write to it (Knoppix could not). No as a distro that doesn't get that much coverage in the Linux community… I think it is absolutely brilliant….. It has most needed apps installed (I'm basing this on the LiveCD) and it has a one click install system too (CNR)… where you can get all manner of apps and utilities (Kdevelop, Apache, PHP, ect).You can also use apt-get and install rpms. I reckon I might dual boot my Suse box with it.

What I find hard to fathom is how Linspire (Formally lindows) manages to get usb working so smoothly without having to fuck about in /dev/ and manually mounting, Suse has been in the game much longer and they can't get it right (they won't even support their own usb mount system either). Linspire has only been around for a few years and I reckon they hav nailed the Linux Desktop to a tee, Granted you have to pay but I paid for Suse too so that's that argument out the window. For any Nooobies (I still consider myself a relatively noob) I would highly recommend it. A+++++++++