Making Up for Lost Time

For those wondering why the posts suddenly stopped, I have a very good explanation:

Our computer was infected with a virus. (cue ominous music...dun dun dunnnnnnnnnn)

It was one of those things were the program hid all of our files, shortcuts, and everything and then started sending messages like "your OS is failing" or "your hard drive is going to crash due to memory loss". Worse was the "click here to scan." When you do, this thing called System Check, which looks like something from Microsoft (but it's NOT) started "scanning" for errors, "found" sixteen, "fixed" seven of them, and suggested that if I wanted to fix the other nine, I had to "buy this program."

Red Flag!!!

Already something was fishy.

Then when I tried to close the program, it wouldn't. At that point I knew we had a virus. But that was Friday.

It's just that on Tuesday, I didn't know what was happening. So I turned off the computer. Unfortunately after shutting down the computer, it would not reboot. Some file was missing or corrupted and Windows would not start.

Thanks to Kevin, a friend of mine who knows his way around computers and even built our now disabled computer, we were able to log in. But because of concerns about our hard drive, he suggested to keep the computer off.

On Friday, I had a hunch that something else could be happening. All that stuff I mentioned earlier happened, leading me to believe our computer was infected.

But how was I going to get online if this trojan horse hid all of our files? Thank you Google Desktop. The programs that appear on the bottom right of the desktop (we still use xp) were not affected and once I knew that our files were still safe, I started to search for a site that could clear out the System Check virus. It is a relatively new virus as the website I found had only four comments, first from January 10. Following the steps, including a download of a free program (paying would give more features...didn't need them), allowed me to find and erase all traces of System Check.

On Saturday, Kevin came back and after taking apart the computer, gave it a thorough cleaning (admittedly, he said ours was relatively clean on the inside), installed more ram to our computer. I tested it last night. Our computer is now fast. Not Tony Campana fast (hey, needed to reference baseball somehow), but faster than what my family is used to with this machine.

So there you have it. The Random Card of the Day posts will be done today, and I have six or seven blogs to add to the Sports Card Blogroll. I have a lot of catching up to do.

Sincerely,

JayBee Anama