December 20, 2011

  • Adventures with a Computer Virus

    When I woke up, everything was strange. Little windows kept appearing in the bottom right corner, saying that the computer was infected! Perform a free scan now! And they seemed so eager for my attention that I was skeptical right away. I unplugged my computer from the internet, turned it off, and hoped that the problems would go away.

    They didn't. The world was not so kind.

    Later, my sister told me that she couldn't access the internet from my computer. I found that I could only with great difficulty get an internet window open, and that even then, I couldn't load a single webpage. Not even something as simple as Google. I was very cross, and I resolved to do something about it.

    Remembering a fix Merlin (name redacted) had shown me during the summer, I went to a different computer and downloaded a trial version of Antimalwarebytes, and then transferred it to my computer with a flash drive. And then it scanned for two hours! But at the end of it, things were working again, and now I have internet again.

    It seems to have deleted some of my most prevalent Gchat contacts, if their disappearance from my list and this computer trouble are related at all. I'll be trying to re-establish contact with those people in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I'm happy to have internet again.