Well, I have been unable to post for 5 days. My computer has been in disarray thanks to one of those wonderful people out in the blue skies of the internet that love to send out viruses.

Some lovely person sent out a lovely virus or Trojan that infiltrated my computer and damaged the operating system, not just create a minor nuisance. I spent two days attempting to rid the computer of the virus. The first day, I attempted to clean the drive while running off the machine, hoping it was only a superficial problem. The second day, I removed the hard drive from my computer, hooked it up as an external drive to another computer and attempted to clean it that way. The second day, I ran chkdsk on the external drive and it showed error. Further research showed that a file within the Windows directory had been damaged.

The effects of the damage were fascinating, in a sick way. The computer degenerated over a couple of days, before I was certain there was a problem. The first day, the computer virus detection did not find a problem, though it was clear there was a problem. Dr Web, AVG, Microsoft Security Essentials, and MalwareBytes all failed to see the problem, though the computer was having problems slowing down and locking up. The second day, All virus detection could find a problem, but, none could scan past the problem. Each version of the software that attempted to scan the disk would hang the computer (or at least the user interface). The third day, the computer would power up complete initialization and within 5 minutes, the keyboard and mouse were no longer field by the OS. It was not until that point.

Days 2 and 3, defined above, were the first 2 days I spent attempting to clean the computer … first as an internal drive, then as an external hard drive. No luck. Luckily, I was able to use the hard drive as an external hard drive and save off all my important data files, verify they were free of virus and archive the contents.

Days 4 and 5, I spent recovering … reformatting the hard drive, reloading operating system, re-installing applications and loading data files. I was surprised how much hassle it was to load applications. I had loaded the apps to the previous computer, but, somehow the frustration of the computer crash caused the re-installation to feel all that more frustrating and long … you can imagine.

Finally, late this evening, I am almost back to ground level 0 … back to a workable state. Not the optimal state, but, back to a functional state … thank goodness.

I think my big problem was my failure to remove the hard drive the first day and do an external scan. Though I can not be sure, from the behavior of the hard drive, I believe that if I had removed the hard drive earlier and done scans, I might have caught the problem earlier and fixed the problem before it became so severe … but, there is no guarantee I could have caught it as an external drive earlier.

Thank you Red Baron for blowing my week. I hope you enjoyed downing my computer. I love you too.

🙂
Dave