It will only go dead for you if you haven't removed the malware which is sending your dns lookups to an evil server in Zambia or someplace. I removed it from a couple winderz machines last year. Thing is the machines were virtually unusable with it in there. I'm sure there are variants, though. Up to date Antivirus and Malwarebytes took care of it, once the process was stopped with a small downloadable utility.

Of course, the Linux boxen in the 9J household just kept on purring.