I never related to commercials before........
I was offline for last weekend, and I am just now getting the computer back to where it should be. Somehow, despite Norton Anti-virus, and a router, and not downloading anything from anyone that I don't know, I managed to get what I think was a computer virus.
After getting a few illegal operation errors on Friday night trying to shutdown Windows, I tried to boot up the computer Saturday morning, and it wouldn't even load windows. I got some error that said "Couldn't load user.exe. You must reinstall Windows."
That is a heck of a thing to see. At that point I wasn't sure whether this was an accident, a corrupted file, or a virus. I figured that I would just reinstall windows, no biggie. So I threw in my windows install disk and it starts on a scandisk, checking the existing windows file structure.....this is when the dirty diaper hit the fan. I kept getting notifications that windows was finding files that had file names that were too long, or that the files were no longer useable. Not just one or two files, but I pressed 'enter' 3245 times telling windows to try to fix the files before I decided that I just needed to reformat the drive, in the dire attempt to preserve a tiny, shred of my sanity.
Now, thank everything that I can, that I went through the hassle of installing a Dynamic Drive Overlay, so that I could partition my 160 gigs into 4 drives. This computer would only recoginize a maximum of 2 gigs, without the DDO. And I have pretty religiously been putting most programs on other then my boot drive. With the noteable exception of Quicken, which took me 90 minutes to reconstruct from my last backup, over a month ago.
I only had to format my boot drive.
But I was such an idiot when it came to my network card. I don't believe that I was so silly as to get the network cards mixed up between the two computers. I spent more time then I care to admit trying to force the drivers to work on the wrong network card. Once I realized what I did, it took me 30 seconds to reconfigure and get my computer back online. So much for being great under stressful situations.
It made me think, so many times, of that stupid AOL commercial that has been on recently, with all the different people saying how they want there computers to crash or get a virus. AOL's belabored point being that not everyone is as protected as they think.....but for the life of me, I can't think of anything else I could have done.
After getting a few illegal operation errors on Friday night trying to shutdown Windows, I tried to boot up the computer Saturday morning, and it wouldn't even load windows. I got some error that said "Couldn't load user.exe. You must reinstall Windows."
That is a heck of a thing to see. At that point I wasn't sure whether this was an accident, a corrupted file, or a virus. I figured that I would just reinstall windows, no biggie. So I threw in my windows install disk and it starts on a scandisk, checking the existing windows file structure.....this is when the dirty diaper hit the fan. I kept getting notifications that windows was finding files that had file names that were too long, or that the files were no longer useable. Not just one or two files, but I pressed 'enter' 3245 times telling windows to try to fix the files before I decided that I just needed to reformat the drive, in the dire attempt to preserve a tiny, shred of my sanity.
Now, thank everything that I can, that I went through the hassle of installing a Dynamic Drive Overlay, so that I could partition my 160 gigs into 4 drives. This computer would only recoginize a maximum of 2 gigs, without the DDO. And I have pretty religiously been putting most programs on other then my boot drive. With the noteable exception of Quicken, which took me 90 minutes to reconstruct from my last backup, over a month ago.
I only had to format my boot drive.
But I was such an idiot when it came to my network card. I don't believe that I was so silly as to get the network cards mixed up between the two computers. I spent more time then I care to admit trying to force the drivers to work on the wrong network card. Once I realized what I did, it took me 30 seconds to reconfigure and get my computer back online. So much for being great under stressful situations.
It made me think, so many times, of that stupid AOL commercial that has been on recently, with all the different people saying how they want there computers to crash or get a virus. AOL's belabored point being that not everyone is as protected as they think.....but for the life of me, I can't think of anything else I could have done.
posted by Tim @ 1:25 AM
2 Comments:
At 4:19 AM ,
Kyle Wash said...
I sue AVG in addition to another fre anti-virus that Icant remeber. I also use Sybot Search and Destroy and Adaware. I can't be too carefull because I dont have my windows discs around to re-intall so easily(cough cough). Oh yeah XP home/pro had some new updates 2 days ago. Make sure you get them.
At 4:19 AM ,
Kyle Wash said...
also look into the usage of paragraphs.
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