First Me - Now My Computer
You may recall from previous entries that I have not been a well chap for a while. Sickness constantly coming and going, mostly light colds but the occasional crippling illness has taken hold on me as well. Now it seems I have not only passed these problems to my friends but also my computer.
That’s right, I managed to get a virus on my computer. Now, reader of mine blabber, you most likely know that I am reasonably good at things involving computers and for this reason I rarely worry about such things, so how did this happen? Well, bugger me if I know, but I’d say it’s been there for around two weeks before I noticed it. It’s nothing bad, it just alters some files (by adding bits at the start) to spread itself and occasionally delete things. To my knowledge nothing was deleted, so nothing was lost. What makes me feel a bit stupid is how long it took for me to realise it was there.
How did I notice you ask? Well, a while ago, notepad stopped working (this is quite normal for windows for bits to stop working), so I replaced it and went away again. After about a week several programs stopped working and just crashed the system. I re-installed only to find that they worked once or twice and then crashed again. Strange, thought I, the ever-intelligent type. At first I thought it was due to the programs use of other libraries, perhaps windows installer had been corrupted? It wasn’t until it suddenly occurred to me that the files might have been altered and checked by trying them on another computer (where they also failed to work), that I realised all was not tickety boo.
So I examined the files in question, found the bit added to the start and removed it. All was well. I then tried to search for a bit of code unique to this thing and found that at least 110 files had been corrupted. Bugger.
What does one do in a situation like this? Well, you can manually fix each file, which takes ages, or you can get a program to do it for you. The latter is known as a virus killer, so I got one and let it do it’s work. It removed the vuirus and another two I didn’t know about and I was happy.
Well I was until I tried to use the programs and found that the stupid program had not fixed the problem but simply deleted the files. How very very rude indeed, I guess the moral of the story is that if you want it done right, you do it yourself.
Oh, and I’ve got four things due tomorrow and I haven’t really started any of them. Again.