Day: July 27, 2021

I might have just converted to a role that might be called a “digital anti-vaxxer.”

My computer crashed this morning. It was far from catastrophic – I have good back-up habits. I lost a few dozen recent pictures, and some text files I can’t even remember what was in them. I may have lost some other stuff. Further, I have a perfectly good “extra” machine, which I am now using. It’s not as comfortable in its configuration, and will take some time to get used to, but it serves my basic needs fine.

And I knew that the computer in question was sickly – it was my HP “Lemon” laptop I bought in 2018, which has always had a bad battery and long had other issues as well. I have been using it as a desktop computer (because bad battery). I had changed the windows over to Linux. It wasn’t a terrible machine.

I believe the mistake I made, yesterday, was to let alarmism seen on the internet induce me to finally look into installing some anti-virus software on my Linux machine. I did a little bit of looking around and elected something called Clamav.

As background: I have never run anti-virus software on my Linux machines. And frankly, I’ve never had problems with viruses or malware on my Linux machines. Even on my Windows computers, when I’ve had and used them, I have never installed any kind of paid anti-virus, though for Windows machines I’ve occasionally run “system scan” or system monitors of various kinds.

I had always felt that with respect to anti-virus software, the cure was worse than the disease. But with respect to the principle, I could see where people who had less comfort and familiarity with the inner-workings of computers might have a reasonable use for anti-virus software. Or, barring that, they can get Apple products, which has the anti-virus buried inside it at such a level that it’s invisible and relatively non-disruptive to the user.

Anyway, back to my narrative: I installed the Linux anti-virus software on my computer yesterday. And, having never had a major problem with my Lemon’s software (only ever with hardware, before), this morning, I found the machine was “bricked” – this is a term used to describe computers or smartphones that simply cease, utterly, to work. Black screen, no boot, that kind of thing.

The only thing that I did different was install that antivirus software. So my conclusion: the cure was indeed much, much worse than the disease. And I am an ever more committed digital anti-vaxxer than ever before.

Which feels odd, since I’m not an anti-vaxxer with respect to human vaccines – which is a big deal these days. I know lots of people who are anti-vaxxers in the human realm. Those people befuddle me. So I suppose to the typical loyal consumer of anti-virus software, I must seem equally befuddling.