USBeware

because i have been downloading music and video files from bittorrent, and my laptop C drive capacity is mega small, i have sorta maxed out. i haven't gotten a chance to search for a large external drive like a terabyte but i see these vendors that sell these somewhat cheap 36GB USB drives. i thought i would take a chance and buy one of them, mostly because i seriously need extra space. i knew they would be fakes but as long as they worked, i was cool.

BAD IDEA.

not because they don't work but because 3 Trojan viruses were installed on them. when i plugged it into my laptop, it said it automatically installed "drivers." well it installed viruses instead. so dave had me format the USB immediately then download ad aware and spybot and run them twice. i formatted the USB drive several more times. maybe a fluke but i tried saving a Word file on the USB disk and it somehow crashed the file. then when i tried to transfer my large music files onto the USB disk, it didn't because there was an error with one of the music files. when i opened up the USB disk to check the contents, it had these 3 mysterious files and although it said my Word file was on there, i could not locate it. suspicious behavior. so dave thinks the virus has officially infected my laptop and now infects any external drive i plug into my USB port. he had me immediately download an actual antivirus (here i thought the ad aware and spybot were sufficient) and i am running that now.

i am bummed because:
1. i wasted 110 rmb if this USB ends up unusable due to the virus
2. it infected my laptop like a bad H1N1 virus.

i knew it was too good to be true. 36GB for just over 15US? doesn't add up. and i'm no math expert.