Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster

By MATT RICHTEL and JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 - Add personal computers to the list of throwaways in the disposable society.

On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker's Dell desktop computer was overrun by spyware and adware -- stealth software that delivers intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user's machine -- he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He threw out the whole computer.

Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine.

He is not alone in his surrender in the face of growing legions of digital pests, not only adware and spyware but computer viruses and other Internet-borne infections as well. Many PC owners are simply replacing embattled machines rather than fixing them.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And how long do they have those _new_ machines until they also get polluted and have to be replaced? I'd think there might be a market in doing some dumpster diving, retrieving those old machines, doing a total init of the hard drive and starting over from scratch, reloading them, etc. My pay for same would come from refurbishing the old machines with a totally new (and as of then unmolested) hard drive, absolutely _loaded_ with all the most recent virus protection and spam protection software. Then I would sell them for fifty or a hundred dollars each. And I would probably load Linux on them instead of Windows, or maybe in addition to Windows

2000 or Windows 98. PAT]