I spent a big chunk of yesterday helping a friend whose computer has suddenly stopped dialing up to the internet. Instead of the connection, she now gets the number unobtainable tone. Turns out she has had a lucky escape. Her machine had fallen victim to one of these nasty trojan things that redirects your dialup account to a very expensive number and then costs you a fortune in telephone calls. Fortunately the number has been removed, but this left her with a non-working internet connection.

I tried some tidying up and removed a whole load of trojans and spyware, but the dialup is still broken. I'm going to have to go in there with a bootable disk and a virus killer CD I think. I really, really hate this kind of thing. That some people can exploit a system to cause this kind of grief is totally unacceptable to me. It makes me rather cross that someone who just wants to use their computer can get hit by this kind of nasty behaviour.

They say that Vista will knock this kind of thing on the head. I really really hope so.