Monday, February 15, 2010

So far, so good


So, here's what happened.
Apparently I had a virus called Anti-virus 2010. Some shitty programmer with nothing else to do but ruin folks' lives invented an insidious little program. It's a pop-up window, and when you hit CLOSE, it begins installation. THEN it overrides all your anti-virus and malware software. THEN it attaches itself to Google, and jumps into place trying to sell you bogus anti-virus software. Evidently, it will extricate itself after you buy his worthless product. In my book, that's called extortion.

I've instructed my kids to just close any pop ups, but that's no longer good advice. Now you have to go to the windows task manager and end the task.

So I hauled my CPU to my friend Scott Johnson at 2nd Chance Technology in Decorah, Iowa. scotterikjohnson@gmail.com. After about a day's notice, I dropped it off with him at 8pm and picked it up at 6am the next morning. He cleaned everything out and now I'm back in business. This guys ROCKS!!! And it's a long story why I was in Northeast Iowa, and not home in Minnesota.

But here's the weird thing - I can't seem to comment on anyone's blog!! Even though I'm signed in.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Glad you got it figured out! Techies rock!

Scott J. said...

Give me a call Tuesday when you have time, so I can follow up on something for you. Thanks!

Missy said...

Scott: Hero!

LoieJ said...

If he recommends any good clean up programs, will you let us know? I had that happen once when I thought I was filling out a survey for the presidential election. I got mal ware, then tons of spam ever since.

I can't get on Yahoo from Firefox, only from IE, and ditto when I'm at this computer at my sister's house.

Scott J. said...

Well, Blogger won't accept my HTML for some reason, but...

CCleaner for general clean up - browswer and temp files

Malwarebytes for general spyware/virus scan and removal

Ad-Aware is a good any-spyware app

AVG 8 is a good anti-virus app

Microsoft Security Essentials is probably the best free, real-time protection suite out there, right now. (You should disable or delete any other real-time apps, e.g. McAfee, Norton, etc., and only run one real-time app at a time.)

Scott J. said...

If you're having trouble accessing certain sites with certain browsers, make sure you clear your browser cache. Then, check the clock on your PC. If the date is off, it can cause problems.

And Google Chrome is a great browser, if you're looking for something secure and snappy.

Shannon said...

OMG, how awful. That is ridiculous. People who do things like that (create the virus, I mean, not fix your computer for you!) are EVIL!

Churlita said...

I will never understand hackers. If I had the kind of skillz they had I'd use my powers for good instead of evil. They're such douchers.

Life As I Know It Now said...

I'm glad you got it figured out and fixed. Scott is awesome and thanks as well for the heads up.