man and machine

Since I'm no longer living with Ashes, my go-to-techie guy, I have to learn to solve my own computer problems. Today, I fought off my own virus by myself on my computer as well as in my own body.

I was watching an episode of South Park online today at a different website and all of the sudden, a screen like the one pictured above came up.  I freaked out and pulled the internet connection, thinking if I did have a identity-theft-stealing worm on my machine, it couldn't leak any info out if I cut the connection.  This Vista Anti-Virus 2012 was a new feature to my machine and said that I could fix the 32 infections found if I paid the one year subscription price of $69.95, two year price of $89.95 or lifetime price of $99.95.  The price points were the first red flag.  I also thought it looked too clean and eager to help.

I used my IPhone to google Vista Anti-Virus 2012 and I found enough websites saying it was a virus itself to make me a believer.  Fixing it was going to be an issue though because, after I reconnected the internet, I discovered that it blocked any web browser from opening up.  It also stopped me from opening up my task manager.  I found a website which gave me three or four options, ranked easiest to hardest to combat the virus.  The first was entering a fake registration key into the 'Anti-Virus' virus.  That didn't work.  The last option was writing code in the prompt screen during the booting process but I am not that skilled so I'm glad the second option worked, entering in a website for the download link to a spyware program (which got legitimate positive reviews and no negative press out there).  This by-passed the block that the 'Anti-Virus' was putting on my machine and allowed me to download the program which quickly cleaned up my computer.

What else?

As if that wasn't relief enough for one day, I googled the healing process for shingles and realized that my rash was already healed to the point where it isn't contagious anymore.  Oh happy day, I get to go to work tomorrow (and I'm not being sarcastic, I'm really thrilled)!