By “unconscious,” I don’t mean fall out of your seat, donut rolls out of your hand unconscious, but rather a state of mind. To be more specific, I am referring to the phenomenon where somebody uses a computer (in this case, an older WinXP PC), but really doesn’t pay attention to the landscape in front of them. Yes, the user is conscious enough do e-mail and spreadsheets and what have you, but they really don’t pay attention to the rest of their system.

In this particular case, the user:

1. Hadn’t rebooted their PC in weeks, perhaps months.
2. Didn’t notice that their Norton AV was disabled (all you Norton Haters, don’t bother chiming in, I mostly agree with you), probably by some malicious code.
3. Either didn’t notice or didn’t care their PC had slowed to a crawl.
4. Was directly attached to their DSL modem (no router) and they had to constantly use the SBC Connection Troubleshooter to get online.

…I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

The funny thing – you’ll never believe what caused them to call me. They couldn’t synch their Treo 650 (see #1, if they rebooted, the HotSync Manager would have reloaded).

So I stripped out the crippled NAV 2004 and loaded up avast!, which found a number of things, but nothing too crazy. Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D also found, as you can well imagine, a large number of malware instances. In the end, I got their PC pretty well tidied up, and performance was significantly better. My suggestion to rebuild the PC hopefully was taken to heart, because I truly believe that after any significant lapse in PC security, the only way to rest assured all the nasties are gone is to wipe and rebuild (I’m in good company, because Microsoft agrees). I also suggested, due to the PC nearing the 3.5 yr old mark, that it might be a wiser economic choice to replace it. This is a sad reality of the economics of PC repair in light of new PC prices.

I don’t expect (or want) every PC user to become an extreme alarmist or chicken little. I’ve got a few of those types, and while amusing, they can be a royal pain-in-the-you-know-what. But there has to be a middle ground – somewhere between the lackadaisical user and the panic prone. In the meantime, I’ll continue my quest for user education and advocacy. It’s a quest that I know I’ll never quite complete, but if I make even just one convert, I’ll be happy. I think you know the one I’m talking about.