Somehow a computer virus snuck through our McAfee subscriptions and Microsoft protection, and infected both my wife's and my computers. It was one of those viruses that waits until a specific date, and then springs into action. I know this because I had spent a week earlier in the month moving computers around our house, and my former computer was no longer connected to the internet. Yet on the same day my former computer and my current computer (my wife's former computer) had the exact same strange set of error messages, and eventually would no longer boot up.After spending a few hours trouble shooting, I headed out to buy a new copy of Windows Vista. Since I already owned a legal copy of Windows XP, I purchased the "upgrade" version, which costs about $150 less than the full version. What I didn't know was that the upgrade version needs to be started from within Windows, which I couldn't do since my computer wouldn't boot up. AAAGH!
After some more time researching online, and a couple hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support, I was able to get Windows Vista running (by using a secret backdoor). It was about 1:30 in the morning when I finally went to bed. (other parents will understand that my kids wake up at the same time, regardless of what time I go to bed!)
The next day I didn't get a chance to do much computer work until after the kids went to bed. Once again I stayed up late installing applications, restoring data, and tweaking settings. I felt pretty good about things, but I still had a glitch in Outlook & couldn't send or receive emails.
On the third day I was finally able to get everything up and running, so that I actually had a working computer again. However, by this time I was exhausted, a little bit stressed out, and generally worn down. That night my throat started to hurt, and by morning it was obvious that I had caught some kind of virus myself.
In a round-about way, my computer virus infected me.
February's been a bad month for me and computers. I'm just hoping I don't have to go through this again for another 2-3 years.
Your looking forward to March Realtor,
Chris Butterworth
[tags] computer virus [/tags]
