Thoughts on Starting Over

Not a huge life change - just a new identity on my old Dell computer.

Long story.

Well, over a week ago my eMachines computer caught a wretched virus. You may think that’s no big deal - that I could run my virus checker and have it deleted or quarantined. This one wasn’t so easy. I ran AVG, AdAware, Malwarebytes, and a rootkit killer program. None of those eradicates the virus.

So I found a site online, Bleeping Computer, with a message board where volunteer experts help others with computer virus nightmares. They had a long list of pre-posting requirements, and it took two days to work through them. (Maybe I’m slow, but the learning curve was treacherous.)

So... there I was with my post all ready to run, and I found out there was a l-o-n-g waiting list. In fact, it has been six days now and so far, there’s no volunteer ready to help me. I do expect someone to help within the next twenty-four hours or so. Then there will be more utilities to download and tests to run, but I have confidence this is the way to go because there was another woman there with the same virus who managed to have it eradicated from her laptop computer.

The virus does terrible things:

1. It opens browser tabs and switches you to them, then loads advertising pages you don’t want. They must be immediately closed. Some will resize the browser. Some have popup windows that are hard to keep closing because there are so many. All the popups have to be closed before you can close the offending page. I’ve had to reboot the computer to get rid of these! Occasionally it will open another browser window instead of a tab.

2. When you go to Google or Bing to look for something, if you click on any of the search results it will redirect you to one of their awful advertisements.

3. Apparently it opens a backdoor on the computer that allows access into the computer itself, despite the firewall you may be using. Any banking or personal information must immediately be removed from the computer.

I’m not telling the name of this terrible virus as I don’t want people looking for info on it to find this page.

So, I’ve had to abandon my eMachines computer. My Dell needed new memory cards. I ordered them and they came yesterday. Now this machine runs FAST and happy, and I came back to it, but couldn’t adjust to the identiy I had here so I made a new user identity and am down to the bare newness of it all... so much work to do to install all my comforts: a personal front page that resides on my computer, my work files, other organizational helps like my Firefox Morning Coffee add-on configuration. Plenty of work to do... and I couldn’t manage to get my bookmarks transferred right. Oh well. That’s what I mean by starting over.