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Dodgy looking car manuals on DVD

Anyone have any experience of these? A colleague without a Paypal account got me to buy him a set of Mercedes A class manuals on DVD off eBay. They just arrived and look even dodgier than I'd expected. The accompanying instructions tell you to watch the instruction CD before installation, then turn off your Firewall and Anti-virus software (to prevent it falsely identifying a particular file as a trojan), make sure you're connected to the internet and then install the DVDs. Yeah right. The odd thing is, the seller has feedback of 2400 (96% positive) with loads of people saying the manuals work perfectly and are just as described, etc.

Reply to
Willy Eckerslyke
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The DVDs were probably downloaded and burnt from a torrent, and are likely packed full of trojans and other crap. As you rightly notice, you're asking for it if you follow the instructions...

As for the feedback, lets face it, anyone daft enough to follow those instructions is pretty unlikely to know if their system has been compromised ...

Reply to
Andy

96% of people are idiots?
Reply to
David Taylor

That few?

Reply to
PC Paul

Merc-WIS by chance?

I bought a set a few months back, and they installed fine, without any undesirable additions.

The reason for disabling the anti-virus, is that the installer programme is quite fussy about what processes are running on the computer during installation, so you got to run a programme that stops all unwanted programmes, plus the anti-virus can slow down the entire installation as it checks every file.

The firewall has to be disabled, as part of the installation needs to set-up a dummy network connection, and if the firewall is running, it can interfere with it.

Once WIS is installed, the anti-virus and firewalls can be reactivated.

If you watch the CD with the instruction CD, it guides you through the entire process. Only problem is it only covers vehicles upto 2000 IIRC, after which Merc switched to an online information service.

Reply to
moray

Yes.

Thanks Moray, I've passed this on to him. He seemed reassured enough to give it a try. Not sure that I would have done so myself, mind.

I did occur to me that the discs were actually hacking into an online service, but I guess not then.

Reply to
Willy Eckerslyke

Not that I've found. I installed it on my laptop with the wireless card pulled out just to make sure though, and everything has been fine since.

It's just a copy of the genuine Merc WIS, but supplied along with a code generator to activate it.

Reply to
moray

As a systems admin I can happily say that 96% of people have varying degrees of computer illiteracy, 2% known enough to be dangerous and the other 2% must live in perpetual darkness at home ;)

I'm sure every profession feels the same about their user base.

Regards,

Tim

Reply to
Tim

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