I am sitting in a small conference room in the public library hoping to get a post up and my other internet business done before they close in another hour and 15 minutes. All computer hell broke loose at my house. I don’t know if I can make it through.
There is a virus on my home network. It has infected several computers and the only thing I have going for me is that I don’t use my laptop at home so it didn’t pick up the virus. I don’t know what it is but I do know it refuses any microsoft site and it prevents me from updating any of my anti-virus software. I reformatted my desktop’s hard drive and reloaded windows. I was in the process of updating it and trying to get stuff loaded on it when the wind knocked out the power and did something strange to my wireless. So, no home internet. I woke up this morning and immediately started getting ready to get to the library in time to post this and try to get some other things done with this computer. I was hoping to download some different anti-virus software so I can take this computer home safe. I can’t download different software until I remove the old stuff the old stuff won’t let me remove it. GRRRRRRR.
So until I can fix these issues I am going to be floating around like an internet transient hopping from wi-fi spot to wi-fi spot just to get my interweb fix. I can only go so long before I start twitching. I realize now it is because there has been very few times in my life without a computer.
I remember we had this computer in the 80’s that played frogger and q-bert and had some word processing software. It made game sound and had very pixelated graphics. Honestly, I have seen graphing calculators with more computing power than that thing had but it was pretty unusual to have a computer at all in those days. I remember thinking that it would be amazing if computers could actually talk but it seemed like a far and distant dream.
From there we got many different computers and I remember the technology steadily grew. I would use them for word processing (I have always preferred typing instead of handwriting) and sometimes games. I had Myst and Tomb Raider. I was bad at both. Then came the internet.
AOL OMG. I was in junior high when we first got the internet. In those days, you paid by the hour and you had a dial-up modem that moved slightly slower than drawing the pictures out by hand would have. Our first ISP was AOL and I loved it. I became a chat junkie. My parents hated it. I started having to do extra chores to earn my online time. My friends and I would huddle in front of our computer and talk to people from all over and it was the coolest thing ever. I couldn’t do anything too bad because our internet computer was in the living room where everyone could see. My dad hated AOL and we got a different ISP but it was enough to start my techno junkie ways. America Online I blame you.
Well the best I can hope for is a solution to my problem so I can stop skulking from wi-fi hotspot to wi-fi hot spot. I think I should carry around my laptop in a brown paper bag with top wrinkled where I clutched it. /le sigh.
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Call me – Chad may be able to help.
I remember our Commodore 64, complete with small TV for a monitor. We played text-based games like Zork, in which my sister and I would put in cuss words to see what it would say. There was this face maker game that I always wanted to play and couldn’t because my sister always had dibs and she liked to play a lawn mowing game. We have come so far.
I learned to type because of AOL chat, by the way. 🙂
If you haven’t already, download Malware Bytes to some kind of external drive (i.e., flash drive) and rename it something completely innocuous (make sure you actually rename the .exe file), put it on your infected system and run it.
It sounds like the one that hit Darrell’s work (and also my home computer), and it seeks out antivirus software it sees as a threat and deletes the .exe file and blocks it from being downloaded or updated (we learned the hard way that if it’s already on your computer, even if it’s named something different, it will still detect it). Darrell renamed ours “happytime…”
Also, you’ll probably want to take down your network and do it independently on each affected machine.
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Actually I am at the library right now downloading it. We had figured it out beforehand then my dad went into the hospital and things got crazy. I hope things will be fixed by tomorrow.
Yay! Internet at home is much more funner than internet everywhere else. 😛