I am currently on a quest to kill an evil dragon that is guarding treasure stolen from my kingdom's coffers.
Well, the dragon is more like a malicious piece of software on my laptop called "Sendori", and the treasure is access to the TCP/UDP ports that TF2 uses to access servers.
I'd much rather face a dragon, really.
- Used the uninstaller. Nope.
- Ended the Services associated with Sendori, and set them to never start up on boot. They started up anyways, and were set back to "start on boot."
- Slew the program right in its nest in the cave of the Program Files (x86). Blood lay everywhere, and countless KibiBytes of the malicious program fell right through the Limbo of the Recycle Bin and into the void of Windows' internal garbage collector. Forced the sun to sink and rise by restarting the computer. All of the files came right back on boot.
- Did all previous attempts with the addition of clearing the registry of all entries remotely related to Sendori. The magic spell faltered -- the entries reappeared on boot, along with the files.
- Did a comprehensive cleanse of the whole system; deleted all files with even the word "Sendori" in it as well as *sendori*.* files, and other names associated with the program I discovered on previous attempts. The dragon still lives.
- Did the same thing in Safe Mode boot with minimum drivers/services loaded. Nope.
- Used the magic bullet -- NortonAV, Avast!, MalwarebytesAV, McAfee, and more all got a chance to scan everything from the inside-out. They only found one or two completely unrelated and harmless tracking cookies.
TL;DR: Being a computer knight is pretty shitty.
I have one last resort, which is to quickly back up everything in my home folder to my other HDD and use the handy-dandy OS reinstall utility that my laptop came with (which I've used probably 3 times now...) It's a solution that will obviously work, but I'm a bit depressed that it's the only solution that can mend things.
Anyone else here run into this little bugger yet? It's a pretty silent stalker, so it's possible you have it and don't even know it.
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With that, I have a question -- at what age did you guys begin your serious artistic pursuits (as in, started practicing to improve at a vigorous rate?) My age is soon to reach 17, and I've only been seriously drawing for at least an hour a day for at most a month; I'm somewhat happy with my improvement over this period of time, but I'm curious to see how many people started at an age around mine, how many people started much older, and how many people have been doing it for as long as they can remember. (Perhaps a lot of "I was [15 to 18] years old" responses will reassure me that I won't be 30 before I reach many of my improvement goals I've set for myself, somehow.)