I got a new Dell D-820 laptop last week. I spent much of the week installing new software, setting up my dev environment, and moving all of the data from my Dell D-810. I was pretty much ready to rock n' roll with this new setup on Friday and giddy about the performance of the 2 Ghz Core 2 Duo and 2 Gb RAM (especially when compiling DNN 4 in VS 2005)....that was until a virus unleashed havoc on my pristine setup. AAAARRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! 

I have been a firm believer in Symantec and we have used it for years. I decided to try AVG at the recommendation of our network admin and other users and at this time I cannot say I recommend it. For whatever reason, AVG did not catch it until the virus had dropped a payload of bibical proprotions on my drive. I got the full treatment, including something I had not seen in a while...Blue Screen of Death. Not knowing at that time I actually had a virus, I went ahead and rebooted. Before Windows could finish loading, the virus set in to installing adware and trojans, more than I have ever seen for any payload. AVG finally decided to come to the rescue. I started a full scan and let AVG cleanup. Rebooted in safe mode and ran AVG again. I got everything removed...according to AVG, but had my network connections hosed up. I finally gave up and gave it our network admin to see if he could fix it. On Saturday I get the news that we were going to have to recover from the intial Ghost we made or from check points, that he could not fix the issue with the network connection. So, sometime in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, I had my laptop back up and running with a check point that was a few days old. I decided to do another scan. AVG came out clean. Since I am biased to Symantec, I decided to use TrendMicro Housecall for another scan. It found 2 more trojans that AVG totally missed. That was the last straw. AVG removed, Symantec back on. May the writer of the virus burn in the firery depths of the blackest....