War Against AMD

I've recently had the opportunity to exercise a strategy we had been taught in CSC165. I had installed a new program on my laptop, AMD Overdrive, which I was planning on using to overclock the AMD GPU inside of my laptop. Upon installing the software, my computer received a blue screen of death. After restarting my laptop many times, it would consistently hit the blue screen of death within a minute of initial boot up.

Faced with this issue I executed the strategy taught to us by Professor Heap. I analyzed the given situation  and thought up a few possible ways to fix it. The plans I came up were as followed: 1) Disable the video card and attempt to uninstall AMD Overdrive, 2) Perform a system restore, or failing that, 3) Format the computer. Following the guidelines that we were given I began working on the first, and least damaging option. I disabled the video card easily enough however I had a lot of issues uninstalling AMD software from my computer. After wasting enough time on this method I saw it was a pointless venture and moved onto my second plan.

The second plan consisted of performing a system restore. Luckily I had a restore point that was only 3 days old and was able to roll back to a point before I had Overdrive on my laptop. After the restore was complete my laptop was back to working correctly with no sign of Overdrive anywhere. I disabled the AMD GPU again, uninstalled the AMD Catalyst Control Center, and have since become further hardened against AMD and the viruses that comes with their software.