Saturday, April 29, 2006

ROCK AND ROLL PNUEMONIA AND THE BOOGIE WOOGIE FLU

(Johnny Rivers)

That's the best song title POST title I can come up with. Yestreday and today my dependable computer came down with a serious virus.

I thought I killed it yesterday. Not with NoGoodNorton Anti-Virus, which told me about it and basically said - "you're out of luck, sucka." For this I pay a yearly fee to 'keep current.'

It was a Trojan. Not the foil wrapped kind, either.

I tried Ad-Aware, which not only found it again but had some tool to remove it. All ended happily.

Last night we had a pretty bad thunder storm and when I came into the office and dog lounge to comfort Jessie at 2:30AM I thought it might be a good idea to turn off the computer since I haven't backed up some very important things and it was flashing pretty good.

This morning when I rebooted, the virus booted too... and it immediately began a deluge of E mail attempts. There were so many I couldn't do anything but try to delete or stop them. I think and hope Norton helped here, as did my ISP, recognizing what must have been seen as spam, and throwing out the barrage.

FINALLY I got back enough control briefly to load a free software propgram to destroy the Trojan. This apparently worked, but it also threw out over 600 other bugs/fleas/germs.

I await consequences.

So far so good.

Later the same day... I apparently still have virii.

Norton Anti-Virus BITES.

I have uninstalled it and $50 later have a years worth of PC Doctor and PC Nurse in a short dress uniform. Or something like that. One looks for badness the other looks for more badness and spanks it. Together, after a nice 40 minute scan, they killed six more virii. I think I'm clean.

Though after such an event every time the computer pauses your stomach sinks and you hold your cyber-breath.

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