Right at the end of the year [...]]]> I have been forced to make a new start for the new year – on all of my writing.  While I had wanted to make a new start, and have a better year than I had in 2008, I had not planned to actually restart even my novel.

Right at the end of the year I got a virus on my laptop, the first time I have ever had a truly nasty virus on one of my computers, which did a nasty number on the poor computer.  The damn thing took over the poor little laptop to the point that the computer could no longer do anything.  It would boot up, then just sit there and do some process over and over apparently, trying to figure out what it was up to, but never seeming to figure it out exactly.  I tried leaving it for a long time in that state, but it never seemed to catch up, so I started in safe mode and tried to work things out there.  No luck.  I could not get the computer to do anything.

I tried to get it to backup to last known good configuration, but it could not because one of the first things the virus did apparently was to erase all of my backup points!  I could not access the Internet, CD drive, thumb drives, printer… everything was locked up tight so there was no way I could save my information and no way I could get help from the Spybot forums in correcting the error.

Finally, with nothing left to do, I reset my poor little computer to the factory specifications and have been reloading my programs and everything since then.

It will start up, but then it shuts itself down without warning and restarts, this happens again and again.  I’ve tried to restart it and tell it to go back to the last [...]]]> I’m not sure just what is up with it, but my desktop PC has started wigging out on me in the mornings.

It will start up, but then it shuts itself down without warning and restarts, this happens again and again.  I’ve tried to restart it and tell it to go back to the last known working setup, but it still does it.  I even tried to start in Safe Mode, but that just seemed to make it freeze up.

I ran Avast on a through scan of it, then ran a boot-time scan that took all night to run through every file and document on the computer.  This morning, when that failed, I went and had it start downloading updates from Microsoft, including the Malicious Software Removal tool thing and some various security updates I had not realized I had missed out on installing.  With luck that has fixed the problem, but I am considering downloading a 30 day trial of McAffee or Norton or whatever to try running on it and see what that turns up for me.

I know it is not over crammed with things, since on a  177 GB hard drive, I have 137 GB of free space.  So it is not a case of having overloaded the poor thing with junk – shoot, all I use this thing for is work, I have no time in the day for messing around with stuff, so I don’t have the computer over-loaded with junk typical of so many computers.  I have been watching the Giveaway of the Day site for programs that can help me with my work, however, and suspect I may have somehow picked up a nasty from that site – not sure, but that is the only place I have downloaded anything from.  And I am vehement in not opening unknown e-mails.  Could just be the computer is having hardware issues too, I just don’t know.

I’m hoping I have the problem fixed now though, so we’ll see if this keeps up tomorrow or comes back later on.  I did just notice that the name of the computer was set to you-(something)  was a series of letters and numbers, about ten of them.  I have never officially named this computer, so no idea if that is a standard default naming system for Windows or if some Trojan might have warped the name for cracker purposes.

I’ll keep an eye on that, see if the name changes from what I set it to or if any other weirdness appears.  For now I have to get back to work.  Need to earn enough that I can replace this sucker if I have to.