The Only Time I Surfed Unsandboxed I Got Malware

[Lode]

Once many years ago I was not sure Windows updates would be installed if I did it semi-manually, going to the Windows update website and automatically letting Windows check for them there. (That website doesn't exist any more if I'm not mistaken.) So one time I did it "naked" (unsandboxed), fetched the updates and had them installed. Then still "naked" I surfed to a Russian site to read an article in English there.

After that my notebook became slower, and slooower. It would take 10 seconds to get a response from my cursor sliding a scroll bar, and every letter I typed would take up to 10 seconds to appear.

I realized something was wrong, but my AV at that time did not get rid of it, so asked for help on a HijackThis forum. But even the experts there could not solve it during the 2 days they tried. I made things easy for them and reformatted. It took me a few days to get everything back the way I had it before as I like it.

It taught me never to surf un-sandboxed again.