Strange how those reliable sites suddenly become unreliable

[SineSwiper]

Maybe you already know this, but don't use Asta La Vista. Back in the day, it used to be the place for searching for cracks. Nowadays, it's just wasting my time in safe mode and running Ad Aware. Doesn't even give me the common courtesy of an actual crack along with the spyware.

I never think to use BitTorrents for a simple keygen or crack, but it's more reliable, and the comments on Torrentz are helpful for finding bullshit before you install it.

[Tessian]

I stopped using Asta La Vista a looong time ago... actually any crack site is pretty much malicious these days as far as I can tell. The problem with astalavista for me, though, was it's unhelpfulness.

[Kupek]

I don't use software that requires cracking.

Out of curiosity, what are you using that does?

[SineSwiper]

MagicISO. Stupid guys are using these UIF files for images. Why can't they use some universal format like ISO or even BIN/CUE files?

BTW, I'm still cleaning. Fucker probably would have installed every spyware known to man if I hadn't stopped it early. (It launched two files called "serial.exe" and "crack.exe", the latter was running for a long time. Gee, that sounds suspicious!) Playing whack-a-mole with a few of them with TeaTimer helping me out. On any other day, I'd almost consider this fun, but I have a laptop to load up with software and wrap before the 26th.

[SineSwiper]

Finally fixed. BTW, Unlocker is a great app for unlocking DLLs from critical system processes. I had two files that I needed to remove, but they were bound to winlogon.exe. After I unlocked it, I had about 5 seconds to remove the file before it rebooted, but after about 3 reboots, I got rid of the files.

[Imakeholesinu]

Finally fixed. BTW, Unlocker is a great app for unlocking DLLs from critical system processes. I had two files that I needed to remove, but they were bound to winlogon.exe. After I unlocked it, I had about 5 seconds to remove the file before it rebooted, but after about 3 reboots, I got rid of the files.

If you boot into safe mode with the command prompt only that would have done it also. But Unlocker is definitely a great tool to use. I've used it before at work.

[SineSwiper]

If you boot into safe mode with the command prompt only that would have done it also. But Unlocker is definitely a great tool to use. I've used it before at work.

I've tried that. It's just like X without a window manager: it still loads up Windows, but gives you a command prompt instead of Explorer. I could still type "explorer" to have it boot the rest of the way. Gone are the days when you could actually get into a bare-bones DOS mode without any Windows junk in the way.