What's the story Microsoft...

I have to share this story with you - I had a malware infection, around a year or so ago, on one of my PC's. You know the one. It's the one that keeps on  telling you that you have an infection and you have to buy the antivirus that will cure itself, or something to that effect...

The Machine was running Windows XP, I tried everything to remove the infection, short of formatting the hard drive, but I just failed, because of the way Internet Explorer works, Controls and Interacts with the PC. So after trying everything and nearly giving up, I decided to remove Internet Explorer completely from my PC, and I did.

I used Firefox instead on that machine since. I checked it again and again and again with a variety of Security Software and Scanners, I got rid of all the infection and everything was running smoothly, however, there was a slight performance hit, the PC just did not feel right, in-spite of all my efforts ..

I kept on thinking that there was something there, running in the background, but nothing could find it... I tried Hijack This, MalwareBytes, Panda Security, Ad Aware, AVG Antivirus, Microsoft Security Essentials, to mention a few, but none of these could find anything. I stopped all unnecessary services, all programs that load automatically at start-up, including all auto-updates (not the Windows ones), but there was still no change. The PC just felt a bit clunky. The machine was not that important, so I just left it on one side, and only used it when I had to, around twice a month...

Today was one of those rare occasions when I was using the machine. While browsing the Internet, I decided to search for a replacement car, so I visited  www.autotrader.co.uk - but sadly, FireFox did not display the pages,  pop-ups and photos of vehicles at all (Probably something to do with my settings), but I knew from other machines that the site and photos do display correctly on IE...  It has been nearly 2 years since my infection,  so, I decided to download a copy of Internet Explorer 8 and see what happens..

I downloaded this, installed it, updated it, restarted the machine.... and Guess what, the machine started working properly after the reboot. No slowing down and no Clunkyness.. With the only difference being Internet Explorer.

So to recap, with IE8 installed, the machine was working perfectly, but without IE, it was Clunky and not very responsive.  And the only conclusion that I could come up with is, somehow, someone, somewhere, probably at Microsoft, decided that, in order to stop me and others from using FireFox or other browsers, or to remove IE,  they would just slow down the computer for you, until you use Internet Explorer again.

Either way, the above is based on conjuncture, gut feelings, and the actual feel and responsiveness of the machine, but, I might just be wrong .... BUT THE MACHINE IS FASTER NOW...